At the Missouri State Fair, a rodeo clown puts on an “Obama” mask and asks the crowd repeatedly if they would like to see Obama attacked by the bull…and the crowd roars their approval.
This wasn’t the Republican Missouri State Fair, nor was the audience preselected for their political beliefs, so where does this open hatred and lack of civility come from? Imagine an African-American family in those stands listening to the crowd cheering crap like this.
Just out of curiosity, I looked at Lafayette county, MO to see how they voted in 2012. It was 62% republican. Not really overwhelming but maybe it is for the ‘state fair demographic.’
Its all been downhill since the 50s if you ask me. Back in the old days people were content to watch Jackie Gleason threaten to beat up his wife or in the 80s people laughed while Bill Cosby joked about beating up his kids. Now society has become uncivil.
Missouri + state fair + rodeo = color me shocked :rolleyes:
Why can’t people lighten p? Its just a rodeo-who really would notice?
I take it by your sarcasm that you don’t see a problem here?
Eh. The only real problem I see with this is that it’s likely to alienate rodeo fans who vote Democrat. Which I imagine is, like, five people, so probably not much of a loss for the rodeo. Other than that, so what? The one guy complaining in the article says it was racist, but I’m not really getting that from his description of events. Yeah, a lot of people deeply dislike Obama, and for a lot of those people, that dislike is fueled at least in part by racism. But a lot of it is fueled by the fact that he’s a Democrat. I’m not seeing how this performance played off of Obama’s race in any particular way. Fifteen years ago, I suspect rodeo clowns were doing the same thing with Clinton masks.
Heck, here’s an article from 2008 about a rodeo clown. If you click through the gallery, there’s a picture of him wearing a Hilary Clinton mask. Also racist? The clown in the Hilary mask is black, so I suppose we shouldn’t rule it out…
This happened in my state, which has for the past decade or two been going in the opposite direction of the rest of the nation in becoming more and more like a southern red state (though we do still have a DLC style Democratic governor, and a Democratic senator, thanks to Todd Akin) and I am pretty disgusted by it. On the other hand it has been nice to see that even the archconservative Republican lieutenant governor denounced what happened, and the people in charge of the fair have apologised.
“Become”? There was a time in American history when fun family entertainment was a public lynching, announced beforehand in the newspapers.
A friend of mine actually happens to be working that fair as we speak. (I think it’s with her job wherein she dons a silly non-racist costume with a gigantic head/hat and sings and dances, but I dunno, maybe she’s mucking stables this week. It’s that kind of friend.) She says everyone involved with the running of the fair is mortified. Not “sorry for the cameras,” or “sorry we got caught,” but truly disturbed and horrified that this happened. It wasn’t, she says, anything the clown shared plans of upfront, he was acting alone, and probably won’t be working for them again, ever.
I hope she’s right.
I guess it all depends on whose bull is trying to gore.
Latest word heard is that the alleged “clown” is banned from any further involvement with MO state fairs, rodeos, etc.
While I’m not going to dig around for a cite, I would be surprised if no Democrats ever dressed up in GW Bush masks and did similar things when he was president. I have to say, this just doesn’t get my own RO meter ticking even a little bit, and seems kind of silly.
Where does open hatred and lack of civility (in US politics) come from? Well, seems almost traditional, considering some of the political cartoons and various political attacks that have happened in our history.
I think playing the race card here is a mistake, as I’m fairly sure that had Kerry (or some other white guy) been president you’d still have Republicans symbolically burn an effigy of him…sort of like folks did when Bush was president. US politics has become increasingly polarized and rancorous in the last few decades, starting I think with Clinton (though not nearly as polarized and rancorous as it was in the good old days when you had tar and feathers and duels could be fought).
I doubt it, since it was the announcer, not the clown, who kept egging the crowd on by mentioning Obama over and over again.
I see the picture, but still can’t seem to wrap my head around it. Did he really pantomime sticking a broom up his Nixon?
Not really.
Well once he’s on the field, what else would you expect the announcer to do but announce what was going on on the field and get the audience excited about it?
I do believe that the clown in your example wore a variety of masks, and your example doesn’t show that the announcer said anything like "Here’s our Hillary dummy, or our dummy of Hillary’', or ask the crowd if they wanted to see “Hillary run down by a bull.”, or repeat her name over and over again to get the crowd riled up.
Have we really gotten to the point where it’s taken for granted that just because 62% of a population voted against a guy, they’ll obviously hate him to the point of wanting to see him sodomized and trampled in effigy?