The body, as well as the head, was fearfully mutilated—the
former so much so as scarcely to retain any semblance of
humanity.
— The Murders in the Rue Morgue
Last week, American went ape. It was an ugly display. The sound
of inevitability paralyzed legislatures from Washington to
Sacramento, but the news was dominated by a small surprise: the
mauling of a woman with a threatening new haircut by Travis, an
intimately domesticated pet chimpanzee.
Everyone realized, egged on by Matt Drudge, that there was
something all-too-fitting about the not-so-random reckoning
evoked by the attack. To live in the company of beasts, no matter
how close to the heart or the genes, is to court death in the
company of beasts. It is impossible, in this day and age,
not to click a link reading 911 TAPE: “HE RIPPED HER
FACE OFF…HE’S EATING HER” — particularly when the
assailant, gunned down by a cop trapped in his own squad car, had
played without incident opposite Morgan Fairchild, and developed
a taste for Chianti.
“This is not at all the personality I worked with,” Fairchild
told the Daily News. “It was like having a very bright
child on the set that wanted to be a part of everything. He was
just an amiable little guy, friendly and just loved to be the
center of attention.”
In short order, America’s cognitive dissonance over the chimp’s
wrath was deepened the New York Post. If a picture
speaks a thousand words, a cartoon is oftentimes cruelly
inarticulate, especially in its own defense. Sean Delonas’
portrayal of a chimp-killing cop — “THEY’LL HAVE TO FIND SOMEONE
ELSE TO WRITE THE STIMULUS BILL” — unwisely represented the
stimpak’s multiple authors as a lone primate. On Thursday,
February 19, the ratio of famous bloodthirsty monkeys to
African-American Presidents sat at a damning 1:1, and in the
frantic outcry that followed, Al Sharpton cut a figure of
relative restraint.
With uncanny timing, Barack Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder
delivered a speech on race to the employees and appointees of the
U.S. Department of Justice, in which he called America a “nation
of cowards” afraid to “confront” something evasively described
repeatedly as “racial issues” or “racial matters.”
Do some Americans secretly, truly analogize their President to a
fat, pampered celebrity of the species Pan trogolodytes?
“[C]ertain subjects are off limits, and to explore them risks, at
best, embarrassment, and, at worst, the questioning of one’s
character.” Without a national effort, led by the Department of
Justice, to use Black History Month as an “artificial” pretext
for an “awkward and painful” conversation, “the coming diversity
that could be such a powerful, positive force will instead become
a reason for stagnation and polarization.”
Black or white, Holder intoned, American faces are red all over
— with embarrassment at how hard it remains to get cross-racial
on weekends, to live with confidence outside of our
“race-protected cocoons,” and to judge our fellow man on the sole
basis of individual character.
His solution? The Department of Justice “must and will lead the
nation to the new birth of freedom so long ago promised by our
greatest president. This is our duty. This is our solemn
responsibility.” It may be awful; it may be absurd; but hey:
we’ve got a lot of learning about each other to do.
Holder’s vision of an American society that acknowledges yet
transcends race is noble enough, encompassing “frank” talk about
“the whole notion of affirmative action.” But it all amounts to a
conference-room meeting called by The Office’s Michael
Scott. Like Michael, Holder insists the awkwardness is
the whole point. But he chalks it up mistakenly to our discomfort
with race, which is nothing compared to our discomfort with
government-led group therapy. Indeed, half the trouble with
“frank talk about race” is that would-be session leaders like
Holder can’t get more specific about the topic of conversation
than “matters” or “issues” of race.
For Stephen Colbert’s truthiness, it seems, we are to substitute
raceiness. The evasive shall lead the evasive. Who in the
Department of Justice will boldly strike up a public discussion
about how Barack Obama’s mixed African heritage — as opposed to
a black American heritage — enabled many blacks and whites to
perceive him as a redeemer fulfilling an old American promise? If
the best our officeholders can do to encourage upright living is
to live uprightly themselves, there is little they can do as
“change agents” to sweep away our tacitly negotiated attitudes
about race.
We’re told that we ditched the Bush years in favor of an anxious
yet hopeful era of emotional socialism. But if Travis the Chimp’s
rampage is a Rorschach blot for the American psyche, instead of a
cuddle party of the soul, we’re nestled in shellshocked sarcasm
and jaded black humor. This may be, in Holder’s phrase, “truly
sad,” but turning to government to change our attitude won’t make
us truly happy.
