Here’s a great mental image: “Villagers chase away Google car.”
The seriousness of UK law aside, I find this hilarious. It’s like something out of a nature documentary. “Thwarted for now, the Google car turns the corner and waits. When night falls, it will return.”
A recent New York Post cartoon has caused a lot of hootin’ and hollerin’, and I can’t help but dabble my toes in the sharky waters of racism controversy…
But first, let me apologize for using the term ‘monkey business’ in the title, and especially for using it in context of a chimp. Every child should have learned the basic differences between those primates.
Digression aside, and with the understanding that I’m a white guy, I think people have overreacted. But that’s the thing about rhetoric: communication is a two-way beast. The meaning you convey is the meaning people take from what you say. My rhetoric professor would ask “Am I making meaning with you?” because it’s so damn important to be sensitive to the listener. Otherwise the failure is on you.
In this case, the crazy chimp story came to mind quickly, so I ‘got’ the joke. Others didn’t. So in my opinion the cartoonist drew something rather lame and violent, the editorial staff made a judgment call on how people would react, and some people reacted defensively. While I didn’t receive the same message that others received, communication works that way – and publications like the Post are supposed to communicate effectively. It created a mess, but one thing’s for sure – it created a hell of a lot of publicity.
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