Obama Monkeying Around In Utah No Accident

News Item: Obama sock puppet monkey was an accident – “Whoops, Sorry.”

Not.

If the world out there believes that, you all miss the point. It’s UTAH. I live here, in the salted version of the twilight zone. 

I love to ski and get outdoors, thus my presence for all these years. (came here to college in 1973 from the northeast.) 

I became and still am a journalist and I base out of here. I covered the state and west itself for more than 25 years, but have had to focus over the past decade externally because I can’t take what’s going on here socially and politically anymore.   

This Obama monkey puppet story is all over out here – but not for the reasons you might think. The vast majority of the state’s population is backing the Lawsons (monkey Obama creators) and people are ticked off that the monkey Obama is not for sale now. I predict you’ll see several militant reactive knockoffs being made and put online in a few days. 

I was at the grocery store a little while ago on the day I am writing this – June 18 – where  a guy and a lady in the parking lot five feet from my vehicle were talking about how funny it was that an “Obama monkey toy” was going to be sold and, then, the lady blurts out – “well, that’s what he is….” She proceeded to say some racist stuff that would get you killed in certain cities in the U.S. 

Which brings me to my point. All you need to do is check out the makeup of the Utah Legislature in this Mormon, right wing theocracy we have out here – all white male Republican Mormons in the 90-plus percent control of the Leg here – to understand people here WANT a monkey Obama toy for their kids. They WANT people to know that they think Obama is related to apes because he is a Black man and he is a threat to the local way of life. 

Our legislators here are, again, Mormon and they are rabidly in support of a person’s universal right to carry concealed handguns everywhere. That includes into churches and schools. When the University of Utah moved to ban handguns from campus, the legislature threatened the university with sanctions Look:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0LSH/is_4_5/ai_95447616 

The then president of the university is a guy you can ask – he’s the president of the University of Florida now. 

Let’s get REAL here. Utah is a blatantly racist place. I interviewed the former Governor J. Bracken Lee once on audio tape several years before he died about his eyewitness viewing of the lynching of a Black man in Carbon County many years ago. Here is a story about that lynching incident that was written by another reporter for the N.Y. Times: 

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D03E7DE123AF937A35757C0A96E958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all 

Now, what did Obama say about the bitter small townies who cling to “guns and religion?” 

Well, that’s Utah! He picked on the wrong group – because guns and (Mormon) religion are the religion out here, believe it.  

Now that you know this – if anyone else were to look at this in this manner, I’d ask, “How could anyone who is clued in, then, (and if you are reading this, you are clued in) actually think the sock monkey was an accident?” 

The state senator from West Jordan – where the Lawsons live – is an out in the open racist. His name is Chris Buttars. See: 

 http://www.democracyforutah.com/node/2022 

And, if you want to do any research read this book:

Blazing Crosses in Zion: The Ku Klux Klan in Utah by Larry R. Gerlach 

The West Jordan area was, for years, one of the  hotbeds of the KKK in Utah.  

I’ll throw this in, too. In a part of town called Sugarhouse – where I live – the state prison used to be located in what is now a big park. They executed Joe Hill the labor activist there:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Hill

Right down the street for many, many years was one of Utah’s most popular restaurants. It was named the “Coon Chicken Inn.” It sported a huge figure of a Black man with an order of chicken. They had Blacks waiting on the white Mormons who loved to bring their kids in for dinner. Those kids are the grown ups around here now. I have had people in my neighborhood tell me how much they miss the Coon Chicken Inn lo these many years after it has been closed.

For more on the Coon Chicken Inn, go here: 

http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/links/chicken/ 

Now, I have been a journalist working in the state and internationally for more than 30 years and I will tell you that the spirit of the Coon Chicken Inn is very much alive and thriving in Utah to the minute. 

I get really aggravated by people who act like we have some form of diversity here because we have an NBA franchise with a few Black guys on it. That’s not diversity – it’s tokenism. 

There are major pockets of resistance pushing back against this institutional racism, to be certain, but the resisters are in the deep minority. 

So – do not let an outsider speculate that this sock monkey was some mistake. Do not let go unchallenged the creators of the idea, who claim it was innocent. These things run deep in Utah’s Zion. 

If you get in with a group of locals here who are comfortable with you in certain areas outside of Salt lake City – even if you happen to be a journalist and they KNOW it, they’ll still use the N word freely, as a common term. Down in Kane, Grand and San Juan Counties, areas I used to cover for the ABC News affiliate out here, people used to use it as the common form of speech to describe a Black person – and a good many still do. 

Right in Moab, for years, the BLM office would NOT change the name of “Nigger Bill Canyon.”  

Finally, it was amended to “Negro Bill Canyon.” 

Pretty place – http://northofandorra.blogspot.com/2007/10/short-walk-up-negro-bill-canyon.html 

However – locals down there named it “Nigger Bill Canyon” cause they chased a mixed race man into after they accused him of selling whiskey to natives back in the day. It took decades to get the local Bureau of Land Management people to overcome local residents’ opposition to changing the name away from “Nigger Bill Canyon.” 

I covered that controversy and had a guy argue to me, “Well, that’s what the place is named. He was a Nigger and they caught him selling whiskey to Indians.” 

Fortunately, in the core of Salt Lake City itself, this sort of racism is not the open case. But Salt Lake is a small town. In the surrounding areas (except the ultra liberal Park City resort town) – there are so few Black residents that you would think you are in the heart of downtown Jo’burg, S.A. in the 1960s. 

And, trust, me America – the ultra majority of people in this state think Obama is maybe even lower than a black monkey.