Pace conservatives who are scratching their heads, the outrage\u2014indeed, the hysteria\u2014over the killing of Cecil the lion by American dentist, Walter Palmer, isn\u2019t all that difficult to understand.<\/p>\n
Given that Cecil was in a designated safe zone, most of us on the right have condemned the actions of the dentist responsible for killing him. However, unlike<\/em> Palmer\u2019s leftist <\/em>detractors\u2014those agents of tolerance and compassion\u2014we have not called for the man\u2019s death. <\/em><\/p>\n In spite of the cutesy name that human beings assigned to him, Cecil was, after all, a wild beast, a carnivore of the first order. If we are to maintain our belief in human dignity, then we must as well maintain the belief that the human being is fundamentally<\/em> different in kind<\/em> from all other living things.<\/p>\n As soon as Cecil\u2019s story began gaining the coverage that it did, I began to suspect that it actually had little, if anything at all, to do with Cecil\u2014or lions, or animals.<\/p>\n It doesn\u2019t even have much at all to do with Walter Palmer.<\/p>\n Like virtually every other issue in the universe of contemporary politics, it had to do with race.<\/em><\/p>\n And my suspicion was confirmed when a colleague shared with me a meme that had been making the rounds in the \u201cBlack Lives Matter\u201d movement (a movement, incidentally, with which he sympathizes). The meme features a cartoon lion adorned with all of the stereotypical trappings of a black male from \u201cthe \u2018hood.\u2019\u201d The caption reads: \u201cWhat if Cecil the Lion were an African-American man?\u201d<\/p>\n To be sure, the left-wing moral imagination being what it is, the murderous <\/em>rage being directed against Palmer stems from the fact that he is an affluent, white, Western man <\/em>that hunted and killed an inhabitant from Africa. <\/em><\/p>\n Had Cecil\u2019s hunter been, say, a black African, or even a black American, Cecil would be as unknown to the world today as he was unknown just a couple of weeks ago.<\/p>\n Moreover, had the animal in question killed not<\/em> been an African <\/em>animal; had it been, say, an American<\/em> coyote or wolf or mountain lion, and maybe even<\/em> one that lived in a conservatory, then even if it was killed by a rich white guy, odds are overwhelmingly better than not that this wouldn\u2019t be the story that it is.<\/p>\n Cecil is a proxy for the African blacks who were hunted, enslaved, and later colonized. And Palmer is proxy for the white, Western imperialists who hunted, enslaved, and later colonized them.<\/p>\n This is how leftists view this situation.<\/p>\n From the time of Plato and Aristotle on through the middle Ages, philosophers and theologians assumed that reality, or \u201cbeing,\u201d is hierarchical: Some beings have more \u201creality\u201d and, hence, more \u201cperfection\u201d or \u201cgoodness\u201d than others. This metaphysical scheme has been called \u201cthe Great Chain of Being.\u201d<\/p>\n For example, the medieval thinkers placed God at the apex of the chain: God is both most real and most good. Angels are beneath God, humans are beneath angels, animals are beneath humans, and so forth. Near the bottom of the Great Chain is the Devil, and at the very bottom, or, more precisely, outside of it altogether, is nothingness, <\/em>no being.<\/p>\n Leftist ideology is a metaphysical, moral scheme with its own Great Chain of Being. Only here, non-whites are at the top, and among these, blacks <\/em>occupy pride of place. Whites rank near the bottom, if they don\u2019t fall off the chart entirely.<\/p>\n But when we get to whites, discriminations on gender, sexuality, and socio-economic grounds come into play (this really isn\u2019t the case so much when it comes to non-whites): white women rank higher than men, white homosexuals higher than white heterosexuals, the white poor higher than the non-poor.<\/p>\n The lowest of the low are affluent, white heterosexual, masculine<\/em> (Christian) men.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know whether Palmer is a Christian. He is definitely white, a man, and, given his practice in dentistry, affluent. Supposedly, he used a photograph of himself and a dead Cecil to impress a woman who he tried to woo. So he is a heterosexual.<\/p>\n And the sheer fact that he not only hunted, <\/em>but hunted big, dangerous game in \u201cdarkest\u201d Africa for purposes of collecting trophies <\/em>make him, to the left\u2019s collective mind, the embodiment of raw evil: John Wayne come alive again!<\/p>\n The story of Cecil the lion is but another episode in the left\u2019s narrative of perpetual White Oppression and Black Suffering, of the West\u2019s \u201craping\u201d of Africa.<\/p>\n Only if we understand this, can we understand the left\u2019s response to the slaying of a lion thousands of miles away in Africa.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Pace conservatives who are scratching their heads, the outrage\u2014indeed, the hysteria\u2014over the killing of Cecil the lion by American dentist, Walter Palmer, isn\u2019t all that difficult to understand. Given that Cecil was in a designated safe zone, most of us on the right have condemned the actions of the dentist responsible for killing him. However,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n