I never got a complete idea of what the Macaca flap was all about, but here’s a letter from the person himself:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/10/AR2006111001381.html
I’m glad he wrote that! Thanks for sharing.
Good report there, and I’m glad he enjoyed his time here in southwest Virginia.
It’s always good when people find good in the US. And so rare in big media. This still counts as the one and only time I have ever heard that term, though. We have tons of South Asians here and I lived in India and still am unfamiliar with it.
Me too. I had to look it up. It is an alternate word for “macaque”. In other words, he was calling the person a monkey.
djm
Supposedly, it was an accident of sorts. Jim Webb claims he made up
the word on the spot, and it just happens to resemble a real word.
Sadly, it sounds like something I could do.
That was Allen’s claim anyway. According to Wikipedia, Allen’s mother is of of French Tunisian descent, which fits in with the slang word’s origin, so I’m not so convinced it was an accident. My feeling is he probably thought it was an insult from his childhood he could slip in and nobody would know what he was talking about.
I mean, seriously..how often do real people make up words on the spot like he claims? It doesn’t pass the smell test to me.
Could be. He could just as easily thought it was a term of endearment (I’ve
heard parents affectionately call their rambunctious child “my little monkey”).
I like to play with words. Sometimes, if I have time to pre-think a comment,
I’ll throw in a portmanteau or Spoonerism for the sake of humor. My father
does the same. But such games draw on words that exist in my vocabulary,
so perhaps this is what happened (intentionally or not) with Allen, as you
suggest.
Come now, fearfaoin, this guy is a politician, one of those who make their living off what they say in public. To throw out a term like this in a public, political rally suggests the speaker’s perceived comfort zone with his audience allowed him to feel free with using such a term.
I can buy that he made a political gaffe, I can buy that he misread his audience (caught with his pants down), I can buy that he let his true feelings show by accident, but to say he made up the term on the fly just doesn’t pass my smell test, either. Its infantile. The act of drawing attention to a person of a visible minority and addressing them with a term used to belittle a person of a visible minority doesn’t even leave him wiggle-room to pretend he was attacking a rival politician’s lacky. He nailed his own foot to the floor and the voters left him behind.
djm
Wow, it’s amazing what you don’t know that you miss when you don’t watch the media circus. Allen who?
George Allen, ex senator of virginia.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/15/AR2006081501210.html
He was on a speaking tour. His opponent, James Webb, sent a guy to tail him and video his speaches. I understand this was common practice.
During one of the speeches, Allen points directly at the tail, a guy of Indian descent, and calls him as “macaca” twice. Something along the lines of “This macaca…whatever his name is”
Good point. If the tail had been a white man, and Allen had made up the
name “Stinkypants McSpiesalot”, the event would not have made the news.
Another excellent point.
Allen is also the ex- governor of Va too.
I would think that he felt his supposed made up word is a word that would “float” in the area of VA where he was speaking. As in, these hicks won’t know what it means, and if they did, they would think if funny since Dickenson County has very very little, if any, minority residents. He probably thought it would endear him to the raceist majority of his audience. It’s sad, but true.
Dickenson County(my last name- the county was named after an ancestor of my husband)
population-
99% white-
ancestry-
Irish - 17%
· English - 9%
· German - 8%
· Scotch-Irish - 3%
· Scottish - 2%
· Italian - 1%
· Dutch - 1%
· French (except Basque) - 1%
Thanks for posting a link to the video, I was also pretty clueless about this whole thing. By the way, he says, “macaca…or whatever his name is,” which is actually quite a difference, I think.
Really… the race card is pretty cheesy to play in an election. There are simply too many other places that will pick up the story and play it to an audience that won’t be bated.
Besides there were obviously many more things to single this guy out for
The hairstyle inflicted upon me by two friends late one night also became newsworthy; for the record, it was intended to be a mullet and has since grown out to nearly the appropriate length.
must be a Virginia thing…
