More Anti-Obama Crime in NC?
This time on the campus of Western North Carolina University, where a bear cub was dumped after being shot in the head. It had two Obama signs stapled together and put over its head.
So, what message are they trying to send with this, exactly? Or even approximately?
Assholes.
This time on the campus of Western North Carolina University, where a bear cub was dumped after being shot in the head. It had two Obama signs stapled together and put over its head.
So, what message are they trying to send with this, exactly? Or even approximately?
Assholes.
posted by Winston Smith at
8:13 AM
12 Comments:
As I told a friend, it'd be one thing if they found a donkey to kill as part of their threatening protest, but who the Hell associates bears with Democrats? Unless... My God, what if there are wingnuts who don't realise that Steven Colbert is kidding...
(For the record, I'm cracking jokes about this because if I seriously considered it for more than a minute at a time, I'd probably throw up.)
What did Colbert say that's relevant?
There was that famous incidentin which Teddy Roosevelt declined to shoot a bear cub while on a hunting trip in the South. One of the contemporary political cartoonists used the black bear cub as a symbol of black America, with TR's refusal to shoot it linked to his tepid support of Jim Crow. (The popularity of the cartoon is the origin of the Teddy bear.) On this reading, shooting the bear cub would express some kind of white supremicist zeal, with evil violent overtones.
Mind you, the slime that did this are likely to be fantastically ignorant, so the chance they had a bit of hundred year old political imagery in mind is remote.
Holy crap.
An economic statement about bear markets? Obama is bad for the economy?
That's pretty scary that we have people that will resort to this kind of thing. It makes me kind of concerned for Obama's life.
This comment has been removed by the author.
I wouldn't strain my brain looking for any deeper meaning than drunk teenagers + gun + Obama signs = chaos. Any deeper meaning to this is pretty much lost in the teenage boy idiocy noise.
Yeah, that's pretty much what I was thinking, too.
I read it as a threat, though probably an idle one fueled by drunkenness. If I were in charge of the Secret Service, I'd still look at this.
I guess it's nice to know that that denizens of this blog are not and do not hang out with racists. I grew up in Alabama and have been around (and am related to) a fair number of people who are. 'Cub' is a fairly common racial slur. I don't know if the origins are what Aa mentions, but there's no doubt that 'cub' is often used to refer to blacks. I'd say that if you were a racist looking to make a point by killing an animal and draping it with Obama signs, and you couldn't get your hands on a monkey, a bear cub would probably be the second best choice. I suspect that a bigger deal isn't being made of this because most people don't view 'cub' as a racial slur. But spend some time in the rural south with people who aren't watching what they're saying because they think they're among friends, and that might change.
Wow. I actually did grow up in a fairly racist situation in the Southern half of Missouri...in fact, I thought I'd heard 'em all--but I never heard 'cub' used in that way.
It does provide us with an explanation, unfortunately.
Rotgut -
I literally had never heard a single racial slur other than the N word before I got to college.
Ever.
I had no concept of ANYTHING to do with racism - nothing about the whole fried chicken thing - none of it. I had no clue what my friends were talking about whenever it came to that sort of thing. In fact, I distinctly remember racist comments being made before I knew what the hell they were - I wrote them off as inside jokes specifically pertaining to the people to whom the racial slurs were being applied because I couldn't make sense out of them otherwise - racism wasn't even considered as a source in my mind.
I wish I still thought that way. It's weird to remember what it was like to be an adult with literally zero understanding of racism other than that it exists as utterly irrational behavior carried out by less intellectually inclined individuals, 'cause now it's not that uncommon for my interactions with people of other races to sadly bring about memories in my head of that racist joke some guy told, or that racist view a friend holds, or how what I'm experiencing does or does not conform to racist views.
Of course I'm not saying that it makes me racist to hear racist people - far from it. It probably makes me more insanely anti-racist if anything. However, the sad fact is, I miss what it was like before the issue was even a part of my thoughts at all. I miss having a brain that devoted literally zero processor cycles to thinking about racism. It's sad to see that there are so many people out there who probably literally don't have a time in their lives when racism wasn't a part of it.
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