A Big Pile Of Macaca
We love Sen. George Allen's "tell it like it is" spirit on so many issues, like the way he called University of Virginia student S.R. Sidarth "Macaca" at a campaign rally and welcomed him to America. That's the sort of leadership this country needs. But what does Macaca mean? It's not an Hindi word, that's for sure. "I've never heard of it," said Vicky Singh, server at Heritage India restaurant on Connecticut Ave. in DC, and a bona fide Indian himself. It's not Pakistani or Bangaladeshi, either. "It might be something in Urdu, but not in Hindi," said Singh. OK, it's possible Sen. Allen is one of America's 350,000 Urdu speakers. But maybe he meant something else.
Allen campaign manager Dick Wadhams said that campaign staffers started calling Sidarth "Mohawk" because of his haircut, and "Macaca" evolved naturally from that. Sounds reasonable.
S.R. Sidarth and his healthy head o' hair, courtesy raisingkaine.com
But, whoops, Sidarth doesn't have a mohawk, so, can't be that. Maybe he meant to call him "maraca," after the Latin percussion instrument that the mambo kings utilized so well.
But that would only make sense if Sidarth was fronting a mariachi band at rallies. There's no evidence of that... or is there?
That's one possibility, I guess. Allen might have meant to say "Mufasa," like Simba's wise father in the Lion King.
Or maybe Sidarth reminded him of "Hakuna Matata," the chipper song sung by a warthog and a meerkat in the same movie. But Sidarth's neither lion, warthog, nor meerkat -- he's a man, dammit! So that doesn't work. Was he referring to macaca sylvanus, a stub-tailed monkey from Tunisia that's also known as the Barbary ape? Allen's mother is a Tunisian immigrant. Oooh.
OOOOH.
I know what I think he meant. Do you?
Major Senate Race Shakeup [Not Larry Sabato]