Editor’s note: Dan originally posted this essay on Feb 19, but had second thoughts on how he had worded some things.

In the Feb 18 issue of the New York Post, there is a cartoon depicting two policemen standing over a rabid chimp that one of them had just riddled with bullets. As it lay dying in its own pool of blood, the other officer quipped, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”

The cartoon plays off of the shooting of a chimpanzee in Stamford, Connecticut on Monday, after it had mauled a woman and nearly ripped her face off.

Of course, political cartoons always imbibe in satire and they often use current events as a metaphor to make their point. This one seemed to be no exception.

The first thing I thought of when I saw the cartoon was that this was intended to be a racial slur against the president. Even worse, the fact that the chimp had been killed seemed to suggest assassination. And frankly, I was sickened and horrified at the possibility that these were intended implications. As I read some of the early reactions to the cartoon, I noticed that some saw the same thing I saw while others did not. Some said that the monkey was just a monkey and that there was no symbolism intended, and certainly not a visual slander on the president. But as the news circulated, it seemed that people began to take up polar positions: either the cartoon was intentionally racist and mean-spirited (to say the least) or that “a monkey is just a monkey” and no symbolism should be read into the cartoon. The editor at the NY Post said that the dead ape did not represent the president but simply represented the stimulus package and its defenders in general.

Now, let’s assume that there was no malice intended by the cartoonist or by the editors, that the cartoon’s only point was that the stimulus package was such a poorly thought-out idea that even a monkey could have written it. The question I have is, If that’s true, didn’t the cartoonist or editors realize that a lot of people would read this cartoon differently? That a lot of people would see it as a racial slur?

The natural interpretation of the cartoon seems to be to see the primate as representing President Obama—in light of the long history of such malicious symbolism in American history. My question is, If that’s not what the Post meant, did they equally have no idea that others would read it that way? Frankly, that stretches credulity to the breaking point. The NY Post has the sixth largest circulation of any newspaper in the country. Its readers are not naïve backwater hicks who have no sense of what’s going on in the culture. And the editors have won oodles of awards—awards that aren’t given to pundits with a fourth grade education. It seems that the choices are that the cartoon was racist, the editors were completely out of touch with the racial sensitivities of our society, or that the editors were incompetent. When the Post tells us that no intention to call the president a monkey was intended, we are left with the choice that the editors are out of touch or incompetent.

I may not care for Obama’s stimulus plan, but this doesn’t mean that any newspaper—especially one as prominent as the NY Post—has the right to go retro on us back to the Jim Crow days. Whether intended or not, that is precisely the effect that many say the cartoon produced. I am grieved over anything that even remotely hints of racism, to say nothing of the innuendo about violence enacted on a dumb beast.

And I am outraged at this kind of response by the NY Post because I fear that it may breed a lot of latent prejudice, racism, even hate crimes. If this is the level of discourse we can expect from conservatives over the next four years, then we’ll be doomed to a one-party system by 2013. Whether that one party would be Republican or Democrat, it really does away with the checks and balances that were built into the American system of government.

My views have changed in the last week. I was at first worried about the direction that this country was going with President Obama’s swiftly-enacted, uni-partisan policies. I was worried that the Democrats would steamroll over all that has made America great in an effort to move us significantly closer to socialism. With the new stimulus package, some have suggested that we’re only a hair’s breadth away from being the United States of France. And when the government runs businesses, there is no such thing as free market competition; it’s a monopoly, pure and simple, which historically has been shown to be good for the monopolistic business—and no one else. Only this time that business is the government. The great thing about a free market society—with sufficient government regulations to keep abuses at a minimum—is that it offers the necessary checks and balances that improve quality, production, and cost simultaneously. And checks and balances are an undergirding principle of the Christian faith: if we’re all depraved, we need to keep each other’s dark side suppressed. The involvement of the government is needed when the checks and balances are out of whack. When the government takes over businesses, where are the checks and balances? It’s an interesting phenomenon that those countries that have historically followed free market economics are generally more prosperous than those that haven’t—and they also tend to be more Christian. Nevertheless, my reading of what the stimulus package may mean could well be wrong.

But now, I’m worried that the reaction to Obama policies is only going to divide the nation more and send us back to the dark days before 1964. As an evangelical Christian with conservative political leanings, I see an evil that is far worse than where the stimulus package might be heading. It is what this cartoon represents, even if not intended by the cartoonist: a half-baked parody that was filtered by the kind of irresponsible journalistic sloppiness that couldn’t pass muster in a school paper of any university in the country. The Ku Klux Klan must be downright giddy right now.

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