Back to Limbaugh and Adams. Controversy was slow in finding Limbaugh's months-old spoof, but it has been growing recently. On Monday, a TV morning show on KOVR CBS-13 in Sacramento, Calif., suggested that the song was racist and implied that it might even be responsible for putting Obama in mortal danger. On his show that day, Limbaugh proved the parody wasn't false wit.
In a line-by-line defense of the song, Limbaugh showed it spoofs the absurd problems Obama's candidacy poses to race-obsessed Democrats. Its lyrics make clear that its provocative title and some material hail from David Ehrenstein's March 19 Los Angeles Times article, "Obama, the 'Magic Negro.'" He showed how other portions were inspired by the Obama/Sharpton feud and the steady drip of media reports doubting whether Obama is "black enough."
In short order, Limbaugh left no room for doubt that the racism his song revealed was racism from the political Left. If media members and liberals truly find it objectionable, as their reaction to Limbaugh's parody suggests, they know where it originates. Dare they root it out?
In contrast with the slow burn of Limbaugh's parody, Adams' article drew immediate rebuke from academics and leftists at home and abroad. They were aghast that an American professor would promote genocide, mass murder, and terrorist training. People representing the European Human Rights Council sent angry missives to Adams hotly denouncing his satire and threatening to take actions against him and his university over it. Even in his own university's newspaper, the UNC-Wilmington Seahawk, Adams was accused of intent "to incite violence, hatred and bigotry" and said to be launching "global war on homosexuality."
Adams was also able to prove his humor wasn't false wit. In his responses, he showed how his column's offensive ideas were drawn, point by point, from the web site operated by another American professor, Kent State's Dr. Julio Pino. Pino's site described itself as a "jihadist news service ... provid[ing] battle dispatches, training manuals, and jihad videos to our brothers worldwide" and openly proclaimed "In the Name of OBL. 2007: The Year of Islamic Victory." Adams had been in the midst of a series of articles on Pino, but the university was defending him and academe at large wasn't interested.
Adams' spoof shattered the indifference to advocacy of mass murder and terrorist training that his previous columns had encountered. He proved that academics and the international Left were not deaf to those truly horrific ideas, and he showed whose ideas they were.
Incidentally, this difficulty with understanding satire isn't universal. Both the Seahawk and KOVR ran polls of their audiences to see if they shared their misreadings of the parodies. Both were duly disappointed. At last check, 86 percent of respondents to a Seahawk poll about Adams' column thought it was "humorous" and didn't "go too far," and 95 percent of respondents to the KOVR poll disagreed that "Rush Limbaugh's song 'Barack the Magic Negro' is racist."
At least for audiences familiar with Adams and Limbaugh's occasional satire, understanding them is not so difficile after all.