I had initially read the comic as suggesting that most of the people who would bother trying to hurt the president are racist.
As the creator has never offered such a defense as far as I know, I can only assume that was me being more generous than they deserved.
And the REAL great thing is that you can facilitate the 0.001% giving everyone (including YOU) the shaft, while you sprawl on your couch in the Doublewide, gleeful that youâre âaboveâ somebody.
Eh. Like you said, without the caption itâs fine. Just pick basically any other fucking word.
The editor SHOULD hang for this one.
I donât read the Herald. Itâs a rag. But these apologies are too forthright. I believe them. It was a wicked stupid mistake.
And see how easy a real apology is? âI was wrongâ More of the Heraldâs fellow travellers could learn here.
Of course, thereâs one last fact: there is no apparent appeal for racists or conservatives in someone offering the president flavoured toothpaste. Also, the cartoonist himself has a long record of working for both Globe and Post without previous incident and shows a generally progressive lean.
Agreed⌠I live in the Boston area and see the Herald front page virtually every day on my ride in to work. No way I believe this was a mistake.
Hah! A woman!?!!? I never would have guessed.
Anyway, I thought media meant never having to say youâre sorry?
Then why the choice of âwatermelonâ? No other non-racially-tinged fruit names available?
According to the cartoonist, the flavor was picked based on what he wished existed. Thereâs also the total lack of the watermelon content being used in a significant way.
Actually, the mistake was letting Holbert, whose work just regularly just barely misses Der Sturmer levels of inflammatory racist vileness, be on the list of cartoonists for your rightwing rag in the first place.
Because yeah, many of us had never heard of this guy before, checked out his body (as in stinking, decaying, diseased corpse) of work and were horrified and revolted. So you did do a kind of a service without meaning to.
Really. Not getting the alleged intended point of the cartoon at first, I do remember thinking, "Eew, watermelon toothpasteâ, as the racial intent dawned.
I mean, is there any brand of toothpaste selling a watermelon flavor?
Is there a point to this comment beyond going after Jews?
According to the cartoonist, he really wanted one when he was drawing.
Like SPEARmint?
Thatâs an adjective that means âcrazy,â and more like a mild, chronic craziness that most of us suffer from. âNebbishâ and âschlemielâ refer to inadequate loser types. I donât know a common word for someone whoâs a screwup or is spacey or inattentive.
Iâve heard several people, in media and outside, confirm that watermelon actually exists as a commercially available version of toothpaste.
Where? Product names pleaseâŚ
Putz.
And oh for fuckâs sakeâa) turns out this guy is resident there so it wasnât just something they pulled off the Cagle Wingnut Cartoon Syndicate and b) she said this:
It starts with a decent and honorable and utterly guileless man who gets an image lodged in his brain. And by the way itâs a brain that over the course of 28 years on the job has chronicled the life of this city and its people. Heâs the very same man who back in 1988 used his pen and his wit and his art to support then-Mayor Ray Flynnâs efforts to integrate public housing in Southie. And for his trouble he endured weeks of death threats from those who didnât think that was such a good idea.
A decent and honorable man, whoâs so totally not a racist douchebag you had to reach back a quarter of a fucking century to find evidence of that?
Again, weâve seen his cartoons. Not just this one, all of them. There all there on the Cagle syndicates webpage. And time and again, we see racist trope after racist trope, stereotype after stereotype, dog whistle after dog whistle. Just looking at them left me feeling like my brain had been defiled for a couple of days thereafter.
And once again, weâre left to wonder whether they truly donât get that theyâre racists or whether they just think saying your not is all youâve got to do to get a pass.
Of course, they do this âoops, I didnât mean itâ act after every push of the moral envelope and have for yearsâŚTPMâs front page has Greta doing FOXâs latest version of it. We could bust the thread, all of us, remembering past versionsâŚ