Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Hangings in America
The recent degeneration of political discourse in the form of effigies of Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin and now twice reported effigies of Democrat Presidential candidate Barack Obama are a sad commentary on the state of America.
Chad Michael Morrisette, the creator of the Palin effigy that has hung since the weekend, says its art and humor. At the same time he acknowledges that such an image is distasteful and offensive, "The image of a hanged black man is a lot more intense than the image of a hanged white woman, for our country and the history of our country," he told a local station.
Yet the effigy remains despite outcry from local official as well as across the nation. The local sheriff says there’s no law against “bad taste” while the FBI responded, "It's clearly distasteful, but it doesn't appear to be a violation of federal civil rights statutes." A special agent with the Secret Service says, “incident seems to be a harmless, though unusual, Halloween display.”
Meanwhile, effigies of Obama have had brief appearances at the University of Kentucky in Lexington and at George Fox University in Oregon. Both effigies were immediately taken down, there were no references to free speech or art, only offered apologies and disgust.
The students who allegedly confessed responsibility for the GFU incident will be punished according to school officials while the president of KU, Lee Todd, “says that he plans to personally apologize to the Obama family on behalf of the university and that he is ‘personally offended and deeply embarrassed by this disgusting episode.’"
Why the disparate difference in response to these equally despicable acts of feigned violence? Do we in America, in the interests of “tolerance” fail to understand the significance of the act of hanging someone in effigy? Is good taste, or conversely abhorrent behavior, solely dependent on the political position of the one so depicted?
Perhaps so. The Islamic world well recognizes the power of the image of hanging one in effigy. We have seen images almost ad nauseam of President Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Many Americans have found these images disgusting and disturbing, yet we have never heard outcries against them from those on the left who now find such images of Obama offensive.
From this lack of response one can infer that as far as the left is concerned, it is just fine and even acceptable practice to disparage, demonize, and disgustingly depict anyone on the right, or for that matter anyone who disagrees with the left.
"We are all in the same boat on a stormy sea and
we owe each other a terrible loyalty." - G. K. Chesterson
Labels: effigy, election, liberalism, Obama, offensive, Sarah Palin, tolerance, values
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Wow Crowds in The Villages Frighten Dems
Sunday we headed south to The Villages to be part of the crowd welcoming Republican V.P. Nominee Sarah Palin. We left early because the crowds were anticipated to be in excess of 30,000. That estimate was based in part on the 30,000 event tickets that were snatched up by Florida residents who were anxious to see this charismatic candidate.
However, on Friday before the event, the Republican Party of Florida announced that all comers would be welcome; no one would be turned away. With that, the doors swung wide and the thousands who couldn’t get to a local party office to retrieve their free tickets stormed this small but growing retirement community 65 miles northwest of Orlando and 85 miles northeast of Tampa.
We arrived about 3 hours before the event was to begin and after waiting in traffic for an hour, only to learn that the parking for that area was closed, we turned around and headed back to another access. When we discovered we were in stopped traffic moving at a pace that would easily give a turtle first place, and finding ourselves 3.5 miles away we decided to reevaluate.
I needed to be back home to get some rest before getting up at 1:30 am for work and realizing, with the crowds and traffic, it would be hours after the event before we were able to get out of the heavy traffic and begin the drive back home. So we made the hard decision and turned around and left.
It was disappointing to miss being a part of this event, but duty called. When I learned the following day that the crowds were estimated to be 60,000, I wasn’t’ surprised. Though I had in no way got close enough to get a visual, and when we left it was still 2 hours before the event, the number of folks already there was amazing and there was no apparent end that we could see.
I’ve read a number on online accounts of the event but really not that many. It was heavily covered locally, but national coverage was limited. Newspapers close to The Villages reported the crowd at 60,000 estimated by the fire chief whose job it is to know such things.
There are anecdotal stories of people traveling in excess of 100 miles to be part of this event, the first by Mrs. Palin out from under the wing of Senator McCain. The crowd was hoping for a glimpse of this energetic and engaging newcomer to the US political scene. The media was hoping for a gaff.
A number of liberal papers and news sites disputed those numbers citing unnamed individuals in the crowd or pitting their reporters estimate of the crowd as low as 20,000 against the numbers cited by the professionals. They questioned the validity of the estimates and on Washington Post columnist suggested that the McCain campaign released the numbers provided by the Secret Service, which the columnist offered doesn’t provide numbers.
I think they are trying to diminish the welcome Florida gave to Palin because of the poor showing for Obama earlier in the week. The Miami Herald described Obama’s visit to Jacksonville, a metropolitan area of 1.3 million and heavily Democrat as attended by an “overflow crowd…capacity 13,000.
Oh, by the way, The Villages is a community of roughly 70,000 with the much larger metropolitan areas of Orlando and Tampa 1 ½ to 2 hours away. So it seems that even in something a benign as crowd estimates, the bias of the media shows through.
"We are all in the same boat on a stormy sea and
we owe each other a terrible loyalty." - G. K. Chesterson
Labels: Democrats, election, McCain, Obama, politics, Republicans, Sarah Palin