Now, I know that some people will read Allen's non-apology apology and be convinced. Maybe he did mean to call him Mohawk. After all, "Mohawk" is a normal word, and maybe he just has a speech impediment. It would be indecorous to make fun of the disabled.
But what if he did know what he was saying? First, Allen has well-documented racist leanings. Unfortunately, that article is behind a subscription wall, but it doesn't paint a pretty picture of this noose lovin', dixie-horn playin', stars-and-bars wavin', gerund-exploitin' American. Additionally, there are the tales told by George's younger sister, Jennifer Allen, in a book she wrote about her childhood. The author of the TNR article characterizes Jennifer's take on her brother thusly:
The book paints Allen as a cartoonishly sadistic older brother who holds Jennifer by her feet over Niagara Falls on a family trip...and slams a pool cue into her new boyfriend's head. 'George hoped someday to become a dentist,' she writes. 'George said he saw dentistry as a perfect profession--getting paid to make people suffer.'Ouch. That's some sibling rivalry, right there. Strangely enough, my younger sister and I never got along better than we did on family trips, so if dangling his sister above her watery doom is the ceiling, imagine how he treated her at home!
Now I know you might be thinking that there's a little sticking point in how a Senator from Virginia - a bona fide regular guy - would know what was originally a French ethnic slur referring to Northern Africans. Well, it turns out that Senator Allen's mother is from Tunisia, and George speaks fluent French!
This is America, after all, so perhaps you don't know where Tunisia is:
Yup... that's right. North Africa.We report, you decide. He either knew that Macaque is a word, or he was mispronouncing Mowak. Seems like a toss up, right?
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