Curious Georgia: Racist Bar Owner Getting His Ass Sued?
Get used to it Democrats. Whether we run a woman or a black this year, the nastiness from right wing idiots will get pretty bad. Look to what the Republicans did in the Tennessee Senate race in 2006 and you'll get some idea what we are in for.
Georgia is leading the way. Seems a bar owner in Cobb Co. Georgia who thinks he's so clever made up T-shirts with a picture of Curious George (registered trademark of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) eating a banana with the caption "Obama '08." When confronted by some uppity civil rights groups the bar owner insisted he wasn't racist. From a Daily Kos article because the original newspaper article keeps crashing Firefox:
The T-shirts are being peddled by Marietta bar owner Mike Norman at his Mulligan's Bar and Grill in Cobb County. They show a picture of Curious Georgie peeling a banana, with the words "Obama '08" underneath.
...
Norman acknowledged the imagery's Jim Crow roots but said he sees nothing wrong with depicting a prominent African-American as a monkey.
"We're not living in the (19)40's," he said. "Look at him . . . the hairline, the ears -- he looks just like Curious George."
Seems to me this fool doesn't have a clue about racism. But what struck me when I saw the original article was that the guy also had no clue about copyright. Seemed to me Houghton Mifflin Harcourt almost certainly didn't give permission for use of Curious George to be sold on a racist T-Shirt. So I emailed them yesterday asking for their comment before I wrote about the incident. Well, I didn't hear back from them, but either I or others did get through to them because Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is now threatening a lawsuit: (also from the Daily Kos article because of...etc)
The publishing company that owns the Curious George image says it is considering legal action to stop the sale of a T-shirt depicting Barack Obama as the monkey from children's books.
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Rick Blake, a spokesman for publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which owns Curious George, said Wednesday that the company didn't authorize the use of the character's image, but hasn't been in touch with anybody selling or manufacturing the shirts.
"We find it offensive and obviously utterly out of keeping with the value Curious George represents," Blake said. "We're monitoring the situation and weighing our options with respect to legal action."
I'd like to say "well, what do you expect from Georgia," but honestly that isn't fair. Georgia may have given us Newt Gingrich but it also gave us Jimmy Carter. We SHOULD expect better than this crap from Georgia.
And as for Curious George, well, I hear he's moved on from mere bananas:
(T-shirt picture from Allposters.com...which has me wondering how THIS T-shirt got permission from the publisher)
Post to TwitterI agree
I was tempted to slam Georgia for this kind of crap, but I know a.) Georgia has great stuff too, and b.) other parts of the country can be racist. I used to live in San Diego and I remember KKKer Tom Metzger...who ran for Conrgess AS A DEMOCRAT. The skinhead movement started in the Pacific Northwest.
So the best and worst can be found all over. Georgia is an example of a place that can seem to embody the worst...but that is deceptive. Interestingly, Atlanta is sometimes one of the places where my own newsletter, the Progressive Democrat, gets well read. So I appreciate that!
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Don't forget about MLK
True, there are a lot of bigots in Georgia. OTOH, the MLK center is here, and where Martin Luther King preached. We also have a fine black mayor -- Shirley Franklin -- who is busy fixing our sewer infrastructure and encouraging water conservation. So I guess what I am saying is that Georgia represents the best and the worst this country offers.