The Confluence: "Only Cardboard" December 9, 2008 by dakinikat Here's James Carville in one of his worst moments. Riverdaughter posted it earlier, but i'd like you to hear it again. Notice how the boys just get together to tell us cute little feminists we have no sense of humor including Wolfie.
http://tinyurl.com/5fd8as Here's my response: What if it were a cardboard cut out of Obama and a noose instead of a bottle of beer? What if it were a cardboard cut out of Joe Lieberman and some one was putting say, a felt star on him, or a tatoo'd number on his arm instead of groping him or say they were doing the same thing and were wearing swastikas instead of Obama team tshirts? What would your reaction be? What would the reaction be of black civil rights leaders or leaders of the antisemitic leagues? Being plied with alcohol and groped is strong symbolism for women. We know that most men can out wrestle us and we are one moment of trust away from brutalization. Many fratboy antics are in fact sexual assault. AND Symbols matter. Would these two cardboard `fratboy antics' I discribed above be taken as trivial or would they be considered hate crimes? After all, a small town in Louisiana became a symbol of lingering racism with the hanging of a noose in a tree by a couple of idiot high school boys. Why didn't folks consider that to be just highschool boy antics? What about the University of Kentucky students that had an effigy to hang of Barrack Obama who were treated way worse than those guys in California' responsible for the hanging of Sarah Palin in effigy in a Halloween display? The guys in California only experienced a little neighborly humiliation. Not so the kids at at U of K. And you know what? None of these citizens put words in the president's mouth and yet there was tremendous outrage in each circumstance. In several cases, these were adolescent boys and not 27 year olds on the way to be a Director in the White House for a President of the United States. This is the jerk responsible for "Yes we Can" and "We are the ones we've been waiting for". Obama rode those two banal slogans into Washington. The only time symbolic brutality is sanctioned these days is if its victims are women, GLBT, and possibly mentally ill homeless people. This has got to stop. A symbol is powerful. If this were not true, people would not be upset by swastikas, confederate flags, and nooses. We need to stay upset about this until this jerk is told to resign.
