Matt Yglesias reports that the new hip insult amongst conservatives for John McCain is "Juan McCain." Because apparently McCain isn't sufficiently committed to hating on Latinos or something.
Can we please stop the fiction that there isn't a significant anti-Hispanic sentiment motivating the broad anti-immigration coalition?*
* I'll accept that there are some folks who are anti-immigrant who really have no objection to Hispanics, in the same way that I'll accept that Barry Goldwater's opposition to the Civil Rights Act was motivated by federalism. True, but it's hardly descriptive of the controlling element of the debate.
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Many people have said that to say Juan McCain is intrinsically racist. I don't agree. It's a joke, and of course meant to be an unflattering one, but because it's so brief it's possible to read any number of meanings into it.
I originally smirked when I heard it because I thought it was a play on how he was half Mexican and half American. I don't know if I really could tell what else it meant.
You could rely, I guess, on the tone of the source post to determine any racist intent.
But it seems too open. To me it just meant more about McCain than anything about the author or 'spreader' of the joke.
RedState just banned any such Hispanic neologizing (nuevologizing?). I can see their point. (They're a pretty authoritarian bunch over there, and their commenters don't like it.)
So I wouldn't agree with Lefties or RedState staff who say it's intrinsically racist. I would, however, agree that it lowers the level of dialogue. But that's a different beast. Almost everything on the net does THAT, I think.
Lastly, I guess you could say that it's stupid to use language so open to interpretation, and I'd agree. But I just don't get the leap to auto-racist hermeneutics, here.
anonymous,
It's a joke, and of course meant to be an unflattering one, but because it's so brief it's possible to read any number of meanings into it.
How does it work as an unflattering joke unless there's something inherently unflattering about being named Juan, about being Mexican?
The "Sen. Clinton (D-Punjab)" was an unflattering joke when issued from the Obama camp (albeit one that Clinton herself originated) because of course it is a bad thing to be representing the interests of a foreign state in the U.S. Senate instead of one's own.
Jokes mean something, and they often tell us a lot more about the person telling the joke than about the subject of the joke.
I originally smirked when I heard it because I thought it was a play on how he was half Mexican and half American. I don't know if I really could tell what else it meant.
What do you mean, "how he was half Mexican"? McCain's only tie to Mexico is that (according to Wikipedia) his parents were married in Tijuana. His mother is a distant relative of George Washington; his father comes from a line of U.S. Navy admirals. McCain was born on a U.S. military base in Panama, which technically qualifies as being born on U.S. soil.
I guess racism really is just part of ignorance.
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