So some of Scott Brown’s staffers were caught tomahawk-chopping while war-whooping, which is absolutely not a traditional means of representing Native Americans as tomahawk-chopping, war-whooping, nothing-noble-about-them savages. There’s no history of American cinema in which Native Americans were a violent bulwark against the tide of civilizing white men eager to manifest their destiny. There’s no history of American literature in which Native Americans played the roles of “Captor #1” and “Captor #2” and let’s just call them “Tribe of Captors” in popular captivity narratives that identified war-whooping with lady-taking and child-killing. None of that is real because Ann Althouse said so:
Someone doing the “tomahawk chop” is himself playing the role of Indian. This Indian character making a stereotypical gesture can’t be read as expressing hostility toward Indians. The Indian is his hero.
See? “The Indian is his hero.” Whose hero exactly? According to Althouse anyone doing the tomahawk chop. Which means that she believes that performing a racially offensive can’t be considered racist because the performance itself is necessarily an act of loving emulation. For example, if one of Scott Brown’s white staffers were to create a television show called
It couldn’t be considered racist by definition because its use of the stereotypical Chinese immigrant is evidence of that this white staffer considers Chin-Kee to be “his hero.” In all seriousness, Althouse’s problem is that she’s so ignorant that she doesn’t realize that the stereotype of Native Americans that Brown’s staffers invoke isn’t historically accurate, which is why she can claim, straight-faced, that “these fake Indians, the staffers, are pretending to be real Indians,” when in actuality they’re pretending to be racist stereotypes of Native Americans.
One day I will wake up in a world in which “Ann Althouse” is revealed to be the work of an art collective trying to win a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for the Longest Sustained Installation of a Person Who Couldn’t Possibly Exist. I pray that day comes soon.
In the meantime go read my other post. It’ll cleanse this stupid clear off your palate.
UPDATE [SL]: This is even funnier when you remember Althouse’s hallucinations about the subliminally racist pajamas in a Clinton campaign ad.
UPDATE II [SEK]: Wow. I mean. Just wow. Wow. I mean. Just wow. Wow.