Bigot-Bait Twofer

Far from being merely tawdry, weird and one-dimensionally racist, I find this ad by Senator McSame to be a small gem of malevolent efficiency.

Because it plugs Barack Hussein Obama into not one but two of those ancient, bone-deep, contemptible cultural stereotypes that always comes to hand so easily and naturally in what once might have been thought of as the Floyd Brown/ Lee Atwater /Karl Rove wing of the Republican Party, but is now known simply as…The Republican Party.

Much consciousness has been righteously raised about Senator McSame’s weirdly tasteless ad wherein the Scary Big-Cocked Black Man is digitally slathered over the flower of Blonde White American Sluttyhood in a way that would make Madonna sucking Gamera off through a picket fence look like a masterpiece of subliminality.

However -- and maybe this is just because of the specific way I am wired -- when I heard about this ad this morning via my Dirty Hippy Radio, my first thought was not of its miscegenistic overtones, probably because I have never thought of la Britney and chez Paris, as, um, sexual creatures.

Generic American-made injection-molded penis tchotchke?

Yes.

Distressed, off-brand Round Heel Barbies, a-crawlin’ with booty cooties, random wealth and douchebag entourage?

Yes.

But not anywhere within a parsec of any sane grownup's definition of sexy.

So instead of their “soiled and seedy and fragrant with gin"(h/t Mark Twain) sexuality, I flashed on what cultural niche they occupy in our depraved media ecosystem.

dday comes close here. His-or-her analysis is dead-on as far as it goes:

...
There's no reason to include Britney Spears and Paris Hilton in this ad. None. It hangs on the word "celebrity" being included, which means it could have just as well been Brad Pitt and George Clooney.
...

I would just contend that it does not go far enough.

Because for the purpose intended, mere "celebrities" would have been insufficient.

When you first think only about their on-stage/public personae, what words could one use to describe Britney Spears and Paris Hilton exclusively? Words that would almost certainly never be use to describe a Brad Pitt or George Clooney?


Well, between them, it’d be fair to say those words would be:

…trifling…

…ignorant…

…lazy…

…buffoonish…

…comical…

…purveyors of lame jokes and trivial song-and-dance.

Hmmm.

And so we have John Derrick McSame

confronted with the terrifying specter of a vigorous, urbane, intelligent, popular, eloquent, Christian, family man poised to whip him back into the yellowing margins of George Dubya Bush’s Failed Presidency

Ah, but John Derrick's opponent is not a man; he is a black man.

And when you plug “black man” into the Spears/Hilton matrix of “garish clowns, flouncing around on-stage for the entertainment of rubes” guess what pops out of the American collective unconscious?


The McSame Campaign has managed to conjure up out of a very ugly place a double-duty bit of soft-core raceporn that gives a carefully measured dog-whistle to the cultural iconography of the black man both as slavering monster and shuffling minstrel.

All in 32 seconds.

Somewhere in the Eighth Circle of Hell -- down among the malebolgias reserved for for seducers, panderers, barrators (sellers of public office) and false councilors -- Lee Atwater is roasting on a spit...and smiling.