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By Victor Tan Chen
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Saturday, August 19, 2006 |
You have to feel a little sorry for George “Monkey Boy” Allen, the Virginia senator running for reelection who is touted as a strong contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. His White House ambitions just got YouTubed. A wildly popular video clip shows Allen at a recent campaign rally, where he twice called a volunteer of Indian descent from his opponent’s campaign a “macaca” — a word that is either an ethnic slur for Africans, or the name of a genus of Old World monkeys — and then proceeded to tell the college student, “Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia!” (The student, S.R. Sidarth, was born and raised in Virginia.)
Calling someone a monkey isn’t exactly presidential-sounding, so Allen and his campaign staff have been quick to deny any racist, derogatory, or anti-primate intent in his comments toward Sidarth. Allen speculated whether “macaca” was a play on Sidarth’s hairstyle, a Mohawk (Sidarth says it’s actually a mullet). At another point he insisted that he didn’t know what the word meant when he said it, which actually makes Allen sound rather presidential, given the current commander-in-chief’s struggles with the English language.
Allen also gave an apology, of sorts. He told a reporter, “I do apologize if he’s offended by that” — which in monkey-speak apparently means, “He shouldn’t be offended that I called him a monkey, but I’ll apologize anyway because I want to be president.”
Regardless of what Allen meant by “macaca,” there’s something unashamedly cruel about his behavior at the rally. Watch the video and you’ll see what I mean. Allen is the grownup version of a schoolyard bully, singling out the kid with the funny pants (monkey pants?) for ridicule while he and his cronies chortle smugly. You half-expect him to start cracking jokes about flatulence next. Do we want this man as our president?
—Victor Tan Chen
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