Elmer Fudd is an Uncle Tom!

Interesting post on Who Wants Gum? about political propaganda during wartime. He found an image of Elmer Fudd online with the caption "Be Vewy Vewy Quiet...I'm hunting Iwaqis..." It's pretty disgraceful, I must say.

At a time when we could be looking at almost 100,000 Iraqi casualties, most of them, obviously, non-military, non-terrorist civilians, it's more than a touch crude to make sick jokes like this. It's only by dehumanizing these people that our government and media can get away with this sort of behavior, and we shouldn't stand for it.

Look, I'm not for censorship. I think people should be allowed to draw any cartoon they want, and post it anywhere they like. And I'm not even sure if any actual harm can be done by images like this, or sick jokes that spread around junior high schools in the aftermath of tragedy. When I was in elementary school and the Challenger spacecraft exploded on take-off, the kids made up cruel jokes (example, purely for empirical nuance and detail: N.A.S.A. = Need Another Seven Astronauts), and I grew up to be a fairly humane, decent, caring individual.

I'm just saying that we should all be mindful of the propagandizing of the War in these dark times for America. And I don't just mean the Iraq War, or even the War on Terror, but the seemingly unending War that the Bush Administration seems intent on visiting upon the whole of humanity. Don't believe the hype, and don't believe everything you read. Except for the stuff that's on this blog. Believe all of that, even if it sounds like I totally made it up.