And in so doing, teach Mr Christopher a bit about how language works — and about why his formulation (see below) is both incoherent linguistically and reinforces the left’s deliberate attempt to “democratize” language as a means toward achieving a kind of hermeneutic tyranny. Consider it a kind of reader test.
Here are your raw materials: “Mitt Romney’s ‘Obama Isn’t Working’ Banner Evokes Racial Stereotypes”:
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney rolled out a new accessory at a speech in Ohio today, delivering his remarks in front of a black banner that said “Obama Isn’t Working,” which is also the name of a websitehis campaign set up several months ago (in case you didn’t get the message from the banner, it was also on the front of Romney’s podium).
The slogan is a multiple entendre, but one of those entendres, intentionally or not, is evocative of a nasty racial stereotype about black men.
When I first saw the banner this afternoon, the multiple meanings were clear: President Obama‘s policies aren’t working, the Obama presidency isn’t working, President Obama…isn’t working, as in, doing any work. That’s not a nice thing to say about any president, but like it or not, it becomes a more loaded accusation when leveled at our first black president.
Just to be sure it wasn’t just me, though, I asked several friends about the banner, and four out of four pointed out, unprompted, the stereotype of the “lazy,” “shiftless” black man. One of the people I called was cable news fixture Goldie Taylor, who, upon hearing my description of the banner, said “Are you kidding me? You have got to be kidding me.”
This will be an open book exam. Please include such phrases as “ad populum,” “politically motivated interpretive community,” and “who really gives a shit that a bunch of assholes conditioned to hear unintentional racism in every utterance by a Republican heard ‘racism’ (unintentional, intentional — either way, racism is racism, and we can only be certain once reasonable rule on the matter) in the utterance of a Republican, and is feigning outrage over the supposed racism.”
You might also ask how it is we’re to describe a lazy person who happens to be black if we aren’t permitted to describe individuals as individuals — which we aren’t; only liberals are permitted such luxuries, and even then, only in instances where the individuals are framed as outliers, in which case they are inauthentic, and so can be described as, for instance, Uncle Toms, etc., without recrimination. Or why it is that they themselves appear to suggest that the phrasing wasn’t intentional (providing themselves with an out, should they be accused of calling Romney “racist”), and yet it somehow evokes stereotypes that they themselves appear to hold very close to front of their consciousnesses, and that they fear some hypothetical person not quite as savvy and sharp as they might take as a direct racial attack on the President?
Ready? Begin!
(h/t JD)
I’m working on *working and the negative of working*, to start. That is, I’m racistly not working on not working racistly.
“This kid isn’t working,” I said to my partner of the kid we hired to dig a plumbing trench, when the kid had only dug 4′ of a 40′ trench I knew damned well I’d have been half done with already in the time he’d spent on that 4′. Racistly. On account of the expectations, I guess. Anyhow, we fired his slow trench digging ass.
Tommy Christopher’s constant race-baiting isn’t working.
I’m working on *working and the negative of working*, to start.
So it depends on what the meaning of “isn’t” is — isn’t it?
I don’t know, isn’t this pretty much what you would expect out of a rich white guy?
My thoughts exactly.
I say we run with it. Apply it to everything!
We could keep ’em coming ’til the heat death of the universe.
“….our first black president….” pretty much says it all.
– The Left clings to Racial demegogging like guns and bibles.
I submit Peggy Noonan’s latest WSJ essay as my entry.
The disconnect between the rot she sees now and her previous vote for Obama is, um, fascinating.
Not having a job isn’t working.
Dan Rather phones in to enter an essay starting with “[Obama] couldn’t sell watermelons if it… you gave him the state troopers to flag down the traffic.”
http://bit.ly/JURyXh
I enjoy the meta posts most of all. Cheers.
Does it count if I call Timmy Crhistopher (misspellings intentional) “Boy” when I refer to him?
“[it’s] also about our culture, or rather the flat, brute, highly sexualized thing we call our culture.”
So shes not getting enough action these days or what?
Yes, it will be amusing, watching the Lefts super-inventiveness in finding ways to bitch about the O’cluster fuck, while NEVER directly accusing chocolate Jesus of any part in the massive fail.
The fact that this leftist douche, of whom I was blissfully ignorant until five minutes ago, immediately flags Romney for whipping out “the sheriff’s a [lazy] ni-*bong*! (What did he say?)” stereotype tells me that “Obama isn’t working” is working.
Peggy Noonan pissed her credibility away when she went all Ann Coulter gooey over Obama.
Not unlike the way Ann is pissing away hers by getting all Peggy-ish over severely moderate Mitt.
Mr. Christopher’s brain isn’t working.
Tommy Christopher’s “Mitt Romney’s ‘Obama Isn’t Working’ Banner Evokes Racial Stereotypes” post smacks of desperate blogger hit-whoring.
“Look at me! Look at me! No, look at ME! I’m controversial and iconoclastic! I’m standing on my hands and drinking milk while the dummy talks! Look at ME! I’m the trolling troll what trolls at midnight! Click my boss site yo! “
Better hit whoring effort that would bring in 4-chan’ers and Fark’ers and Something Awful’ers and live forever as a memegod on Reddit :
” Eerily lifelike photoshop of notoriously creepy rich white mormon presidential Mitt Romney sucking off a cartoon eyed giraffe at the London zoo through the bars of the cage may be the golden ticket for Obama reelection campaign. “
I was given to understand that there would be only multiple-choice scantron exams.
Always bet on black!
Pauline Kael could not be reached for comment
i’m looking for a black sheep named “boy”.
“…four out of four pointed out…”
So the Lefts racial demogoggry campaign has effectively rendered proggressives incapable of rational thought. Check.
We get to write a PW article? Cool. This one’s a haiku
“In Which I Eat a Chicken”
I ate a chicken
Obama likes dog better
I think he’s an ass
“I asked several friends about the banner, and four out of four pointed out, unprompted, the stereotype of the “lazy,” “shiftless” black man. ”
oh my profiling
If “isn’t working” has somehow become a racial stereotype, I would feel compelled to ask how that happened.
And promptly get fired from NRO.
Why I don’t see the racist code words until the left points it out?
I mean, heck, I’m conservative therefore raaaaacist, so, you’d think I wouldn’t need any help finding the raaaaacism in slogan.
Thank God the left is there to judge everything by skin color and then point out the problem.
“I don’t” should be “don’t I”
slogan should have “the Romney” in front of it.
Multiple edit fail.
If the Tommy Christopher’s friends “unprompted” associate “not working” with ” lazy, shiftless black man” then perhaps we should assume that Tommy Christopher prefers to hang out with a bunch of obvious racists.
White Guy to Obama: “Hi!”
Tommy Christopher to White Guy: “Racist!”
The End
The truly incredible thing, other than that someone actually pays this fool to write, is that this is a credentialed White House correspondent.
All I know is that he ain’t an egret, nor did he ask me to pass the salt.
A friend worked for the Detroit Free Press. They were doing a story about how the local squirrel population is changing as a black furred subspecies of gray squirrels force other variants out of their previous habitats. Squirrels around Detroit used to be of the gray variety. The black squirrels have been moving west across the region, probably starting in Ontario. They’re more aggressive but maybe not as smart as the other variants. For that reason, my friend told me that the editors said that they couldn’t describe them as “black squirrels” and they dug out some scientific name to use instead.
Melanistic phenotype grey squirrel, chances are.
New Squirrel Panther Party.
they couldn’t describe them as “black squirrels”
they are schwarz squirrels
the congressional squirrel caucus
The Right Sphere stages an intervention.
I read that, Pablo. Sounds like Tommy Xopher had his Pauline Kael moment.
The only squirrels ever seen in my hometown are black squirrels. They are a genetic variant if the grey squirrel. W.K.Kellogg introduced them here and in East Lansing at MSU.
Here’s hoping that someday Tommy Christopher is stuck on an out of control, speeding bus, with a black driver who is sound asleep.
He’ll die without uttering a word.
And what if Baracka was our second black president? Would it be any different then?
Isn’t he sort of our second first black President, assuming as we do that Clinton was the first first black President?
using “dog whistles” in defense of the man who ate dog.
ted kennedy gave baracky a black dog
Yes, he is our second first black president and Bubba was a lot better at it, too. In fact, Bill was so good that Jugears fobbed off a press meeting to him because Michelle told him to get his ass upstairs in the middle of it.
Barack’s white half is the lazy one; sitting around reading Das Kapital in its pajamas.
Meanwhile, Barry’s black half spends hours diligently trying to get that finger-roll lay-up just right.
Yeah, I said it.
Great new avatar, DarthLevin.
there are so so so many non-racist reasons to hate obama
mostly because he’s a rapist
And he hates jobs. And America.
And eats puppies.
how the hell was he ever elected president is what i wonder
No one I know voted for him.
Probably because McCain was afraid to mention how he was a big America rapist. And lots of white progressives thought they could vote themselves their first black friend.
As the manufacture of the term “White Hispanic” has shown, racism is all that the progtards have.
Paul Mirengoff is returning to Power Line.
A couple of links for palaeomerus’ comment. Leaving and coming back.
Abraham Maslow once said “if you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”
Stated less cryptically, we tend to try to apply our own particular skills to life’s problems even when our skills are limited, primitive, and completely inapplicable to those problems.
We have no choice. If we lack a skill, we can’t use it.
Thus, a stupid man with no skills or knowledge but with large muscles tries to solve his problems through physical strength. If his problems include, say, being arrested for assault, his attempts to use his strength to make things better will do more harm than good.
Similarly, a man with only one skill – say, a winning way with women – will try to solve his problems by seducing women. If his problem is that he cannot afford to pay his rent, this approach might work, but only if he seduces a sufficiently rich woman. If his problem is excessive flatulence, his ability to seduce women won’t help him.
In Tommy Christopher’s case, the problem that he faces is that his bosses expect him to converse and write about political matters intelligently and persuasively. Sadly, Tommy has only one skill, and it doesn’t involve writing intelligently about political matters, nor does it involve conversing intelligently about them.
Tommy’s skill – his hammer, as it were – centers on screaming insults and flinging pieces of his own poo at people with whom he disagrees, while ignoring whatever disagreeable things they may have said to trigger his wrath. The net result of falling into a political or intellectual disagreement with Tommy is that you’re left with unrefuted, untouched arguments, which is good, but you keep wondering where the gawdawful smell is coming from, which is bad.
Like the man above who excels in seducing women but who has no other skills, Tommy’s skill sometimes serves him well, and sometimes does him no good. While Tommy seldom, if ever, changes a mind or raises a valid point, he writes for Mediaite, where consistently spreading the reek of poo can get you an editorship.
(Note: some writers have used the phrase “one-trick pony” when describing someone with Tommy’s limited capacities. This usage is incorrect, as the pony in question must have one trick.)
Somewhat orthogonal to the business of intention and interpretation….
Imagine for a moment that you have identical twin sons. Let’s call them “William” and “Benjamin”. For some perverse and inexplicable reason, you decide to treat them in radically different ways. William is always held to high standards of conduct, and punished when he fails to meet those standards. You teach him that working hard and smart will make him productive, that he is responsible for the consequences of his choices, that giving up immediate gratification in favor of a larger future benefit will make his life better. For example, you teach Willie that the brief moment of pleasure he could experience taking advantage of a girl sexually isn’t worth what it could cost him in the risk of STDs or a lifetime of child-support payments.
Benjamin, however, you flat out ignore, leaving the parenting to his mother. For some even more perverse and inexplicable reason, she also treats the boys differently. She also holds Willie to high standards, but she tells Bennie that every achievement Willie reaches was actually cheated from Bennie. If Bennie gets good grades in school, she actually mocks him for trying to act like Willie. If Bennie is lazy or dishonest, she never uses those words to describe his behavior. If he treats girls as disposable playthings, neither of you ever tell him it’s wrong. If Bennie feels he’s been “disrespected”, you teach him to lash out violently at the perceived insult.
So how do you suppose the adult William and Benjamin to act? Doesn’t deliberately not using the word “lazy” to describe Bennie actually increase the likelihood that he’ll act in precisely the manner you’d call “lazy” if Willie acted that way?
So if the Leftists are 100% right that there is absolutely no genetic contribution to different behaviors, and children really are tabvla rasa, their behavior entirely controlled by their environment, then why do they insist on creating an environment that encourages precisely the behaviors they have declared “stereotypical”, and produce statistically-significant behavioral differences in Protected Minorities that feed the perception that they were “born that way” and can’t behave like White Anglophone Heterosexual Males (WHAMs)?
[…] Sultan Knish points out, these facts are as changeable as the climate, by which they mean weather, by which they mean climate. And while we’re on the topic of the weathmate and/or climer, the trolls are out early this […]
JG,
Sorry, I’m late.
About that post, well to make a short story, the cat shredded it when I accidently spilled fish oil on it while I was going over the final draft when preparing dinner. I can’t say the cat ate it because it was salmon and the cat doesn’t like orange or red fish. I suppose the politically motivated interpretive community will deem this as racist so I will probably have to put the cat out to fend for itself in the wild before the ad populum verdict tarnishes my reputation as well.
Thinking about it though, who really gives a shit that a bunch of assholes conditioned to see unintentional racism in every uneaten morsel of orange or red fish saw ‘racism’ in the fact that the cat didn’t eat the post with the spilt salmon oil on it, and will feign outrage over the supposed racism. So I will not put the cat out after all.
I can email you the shredded pieces of the post if you want me to like actually turn in my work.
[…] See? It evokes. And your intentions don’t matter, because meaning is determined by the interpreter. See also, every Protein Wisdom post ever. […]