I said “yolkels” not yokels. It was an attempt at a pun with regard to the comic strip that had “It only lays egg whites” as the punchline. Is there a Beloit in Denmark?

One business decides to no longer subscribe to a single publication, and suddenly everybody there is (or appears to be) a yokel? I’m hard pressed to even say that about the editor. It’s their paper, and they’re customers (of the comic strips they choose to run) who have decided to no longer buy that product. It’s their right.

(I had to hear about this in the strip “The New Adventures of Queen Victiria”, I hope no Beloit monarchists were offended.)

(This is a re-send I omitted my last name the first time but in no way should it be contstrued to mean I don’t like rule #1.) Regards.

Point taken about ridiculing sources of fear. Takes a little wind out of their sales. I disagree about our fear being the only power they have, though. If you live in white suburbia (and I do, personally), that’s probably true. But there are still people who (rightly) fear actual prejudice/violence, and that’s a little tougher to shrug off. But again, I do see the comic style that was employed, that maybe I didn’t recognize before.

Josh-

I think you got me confused with the editor of that paper (or maybe the phrase “your statement” above was just a typo) but yeah, I definitely think that statement was, at very least, an eye-roller. Maybe he was trying to be slightly cute in an attempt to diffuse a situation. From my personal experience, that has never worked on an angry wife, so I don’t try it anywhere else, either :)

You make some good points, but now I’m going to put on my humorist and comedy writer hat and offer a counterpoint.

There is a good reason why Wiley uses KKK jokes, Mel Brooks made a fortune off of Hitler jokes, and I like to poke fun at the religious right….

It’s always good to make jokes about what scares you.

It’s always been that way. One of the best psychological weapons we have is to reduce objects of our most abject fear to sources of ridicule. It depowers them. It takes away their one real weapon: fear. You can’t be afraid of something if you’re laughing at it so hard you’re starting to cry.

To quote Alice, “who cares for you? You’re nothing but a pack of cards.”

The KKK is nothing but a tiny bunch of sad old racist men with no real power unless we give it to them by being afraid of them instead of seeing them for what they are. By holding them up to well deserved ridicule, we deny them their only weapon.

By the way, if anyone out there wants to read the best comic tearing down the KKK ever written, read the story “The Kluk Klams” by Walt Kelly. I believe it was published in “The Pogo Poop Book.”

Okay, I feel like I need to step in and offer my two cents, because so far this has been a one-sided debate. And no offense, but I’m astounded at how long a one-sided debate can go! You guys just keep agreeing with each other. What’s left to argue? How a movie theater turns a profit?? Anyway…

I’m not an overly political person, but I’m well educated, intelligent, and I follow/vote on the issues that are important to me. So even if you don’t agree with me, please don’t insult me or my intelligence for not agreeing with you. I’ll offer you that same courtesy. Criticism is, of course, welcome.

Did the newspaper over-react? Maybe. Does one paper matter, in the big picture? Probably not. I hear a lot of people crying “conspiracy”, saying that the cartoon was critical of the KKK, and therefore the paper must have some allegiance, fear, or something.

Personally, I don’t feel the strip condoned OR criticized the KKK. I felt that it made light of the Klan, and for that reason I found it mildly distasteful. Haha, racist chicken only lays egg whites, but the bottom line is the KKK is something that still creates fear and anger in many people.

One last thought – the word “censorship” is thrown around a lot, and we need to get back to using it correctly. A government censors. But a business has every right to not publish something it disagrees with or feels is bad for business itself. And let’s not even pretend most (if indeed any) newspapers are impartial sources of information. Name any paper, and its political slant is usually well known even among its casual readers.