Last updated on August 13th, 2013 at 02:35 pm
The Show-me-State showed the rest of America a lack of class when the rodeo at the Missouri State Fair disintegrated into a modern day minstrel show featuring a rodeo clown impersonating President Obama.
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The clown, a white man, wearing an Obama mask, depicted the president as a bumbling and feckless black man worthy of derision and ridicule. The announcer proudly boasted “We’re gonna smoke Obama” as they sicked a bull on the hapless clown. A common theme in 19th Century minstrel shows was smoking black men like tobacco or roasting them alive. The racist caricature of Obama in this modern reincarnation of the minstrel show, was chased by a bull in front of a family audience at a tax payer sponsored event.
While apologists for the stunt are quick to argue that if it had been a white president nobody would be “crying racism”, they are missing the point. The Missouri State Fair has been operating since 1901 and through the administration’s of William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the president’s likeness was never subjected to being attacked by a bull at a State Fair sanctioned event. Nineteen consecutive white presidents with no clowns donning presidential masks and no derisive crowds cheering for the president to be trampled under foot by a raging bull.
With the announcer ginning up the crowd to cheer the misfortunes of the Obama-faced clown the Missouri State Fair went from a family friendly event to a symbolic lynch mob, hooting and hollering for the trampling of an African-American president. If the event organizers thought this was humor, they merely demonstrated their insensitivity and lack of class. Only the most politically and socially tone deaf person could somehow not recognize the racial undertones of having a bumbling white dude dressed in “black face” impersonate the president while the bull symbolically attempts to gore him to death to raucous cheers from the metaphorical lynch mob in the stands.
Defenders of the rodeo stunt lament that those of us on the left who criticize the antics of the clown and the announcer are violating their right to free speech. However, we are doing nothing of the sort. The First Amendment says that Congress can pass no law abridging the right to free speech, it does not state that persons are entitled to do or say whatever they please without fear of appropriate consequences. At a tax dollar supported family-friendly public event, the racist depiction of the president as a feckless negro in a minstrel show and the simulated attack on the president are both inappropriate uses of “humor”.
On the same weekend as the Missouri rodeo event, Maine Governor Paul LePage stepped into a fighter jet simulator and quipped ”I want to find the {Portland} Press Herald building and blow it up.” Ah such civility, the quaint notion that it is acceptable to kill a building full of journalists and editors because they disagree with your politics. The Tea Party’s cruel humor that depicts liberals as enemies to be exterminated is simply no joke. LePage’s comments and the antics of the clown at the Missouri State Fair are out of bounds and should not simply be dismissed as laughing matters. There is nothing funny about murdering political opponents and there is nothing amusing about attacking the president even if it is done symbolically with a bull. The Show-me-State showed us something this weekend, but what they showed us was nothing to be proud of.
Keith Brekhus is a progressive American who currently resides in Red Lodge, Montana. He is co-host for the Liberal Fix radio show. He holds a Master’s Degree in Sociology from the University of Missouri. In 2002, he ran for Congress as a Green Party candidate in the state of Missouri. In 2014, he worked as a field organizer for Democrat Ann Kirkpatrick’s successful re-election bid in Arizona’s 1st Congressional District. He can be followed on Twitter @keithbrekhus or on Facebook.
