Not to pile on, or anything, but let’s look at Republican presidential contender George Felix Allen’s non-apology apology for calling a native-born Virginian with unpink skin a monkey. First, the slur:

“This fellow over here with the yellow shirt - Macaca or whatever his name is [Sidarth] - he’s with my opponent,” Allen said Friday. “Let’s give a welcome to Macaca here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia.”

Now, the walkback! Monday:

[Allen] said Monday that “Macaca” was a play on “Mohawk,” a nickname given to Sidarth by the Allen campaign because of his hairstyle.

Well, does “Mohawk” sound like “Macaca” to you? If this is a joke, shouldn’t somebody be able to give the punchline?

Tuesday:

In Tuesday’s statement, Allen said he “made up a nickname for the cameraman, which was in no way intended to be racially derogatory. Any insinuations to the contrary are completely false.”

C’mon. Don’t these guys know how to use Google? Here’s the Feeling Lucky Google hit on Macaca:

Home
Kingdom Animalia
Phylum Chordata
Subphylum Vertebrata

Class Mammalia
Order Primates
Family Cercopithecidae
Subfamily Cercopithecinae

Species Macaca fascicularis

So, it looks to me like, yes indeed, George Felix Allen did indeed call Sidarth a monkey, since that’s what “macaca” means. How the heck to you “make up” a real word?

Now, of course, there are two explanations for this.

One—let’s call it the PoMo defense—is that George Felix Allen has, like so many of his cohorts in today’s Republican Party, gone totally post-modern on us. As with the perfect spiritual master of PoMo Republicanism, Humpty-Dumpty, “’When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,’ it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.’”

So, according to the PoMo Defense, even though Macaca does indeed mean monkey to the rest of us, George Felix Allen made up a different meaning all in his own mind, so that’s what it means to him. He is, after all, the master of his domain.

The PoMo defense reminds me of Borges’s famous story, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote:

Which imagines a twentieth-century Frenchman who so immerses himself in the world of sixteenth-century Spain that he can sit down and create a large portion of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote verbatim, not by having memorized Cervantes’s work, but as an “original” work of his own mind.

Or, to use a more homely example, when George Felix Allend uses the word “nigger”, he means “mullet-haired cameraman.”

Of course, there is a second explanation: the Republicans are stone-cold racists.

I know what I believe.

But then I’ve always hated Post-Modernism.

UPDATE Yes, The PoMo defense is the one they’re settling on. What fun!

UPDATE More here.