Air Force officials apologize for what they call an "honest mistake." https://t.co/F65HoNYfwu #gapol pic.twitter.com/Rv8aB4JoqU
— Greg Bluestein (@bluestein) January 14, 2016
As accidental as a heart attack — assuming you’ve spent the past 40 years living on fried foods, strong liquors, and intense racial resentment. From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
Military officials have pulled a provocative flyer featuring Martin Luther King Jr. atop a “fun shoot” at an Air Force Base in Georgia to be held on the holiday honoring civil rights icon.
The flyer advertised a noon gathering on Jan. 18 for the Robins Air Force Base Trap and Skeet Club. An official at the military base’s Outdoor Recreation office said it was created by a marketing team.
“We didn’t make the flyer,” said Leroy Minus, the official. “We squared it away. We got rid of the picture.”…
…. Sure enough, here come FREEDUMB!!!’s defenders:
@afreshmind @bluestein @TheJarell It's skeet or trap. Minorities are as welcome to compete as anyone else. This is King's triumph.
— PaulFromChicago (@PaulFromChicago) January 15, 2016
And yet they say we lie-bruls have no sense of humor.
redshirt
Whack a Leader is one of guns relevant roles.
mclaren
Coming soon…the U.S. Army sponsors the Lee Harvey Oswald Memorial Sharpshooting Contest.
BillinGlendaleCA
@mclaren: The joke would have better if you had said ‘the U.S. Marines’, since Oswald was a US Marine.
Just Some Fuckhead
Are those the same guys who used to have the Richard Pryor charity barbecue?
Just Some Fuckhead
Nevermind, I was thinking of the James Byrd Memorial Truck And Tractor Pull.
seaboogie
Air Force – the self-selected and douchiest of the armed services branches because they get to fly the expensive equipment. I’m guessing the cabin wasn’t fully pressurized when they were in their “get yer happy fun times on with ammo” decision making process.
BillinGlendaleCA
@seaboogie: Those are called Air Force officers, the rest of the Air Force makes things work(kid is an Air Force veteran).
BGinCHI
This is about as smart as the advertisement for the Hemingway hat guaranteed not to “blow off your head.”
seaboogie
@BillinGlendaleCA: Thank you for the perspective, Bill – makes allllll kinds of sense re: the folks who make things work. And just realizing that the ability to consider another perspective makes us something that rhymes with miberals.
Debbie(aussie)
Kings’ triumph how? explanation required for this little white chook, down an under-er.
Betty Cracker
@Debbie(aussie): Well, King envisioned a future where the children of slaves would sit down at the table of brotherhood with the children of slave-owners. The wingnuts are trying to justify this appalling flyer by replacing “sit down at the table of brotherhood” with “shoot skeet,” I guess.
Amir Khalid
@seaboogie:
I followed your link and it led to the Wikipedia article about a scandal involving US Navy aviators. I has a bit of a confused.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Amir Khalid: You know who was a US Navy aviator? Hint, ‘Bomb, Bomb, Bomb; Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran’.
seaboogie
@Amir Khalid: Navy is also Air Force, hence the whole Tailhook dealio – aircraft carriers, airplanes….Navy not just in boats. I did a google search and ended up with this entertaining explanation.
Aleta
While they’re at it, they might as well commemorate December 7th by shooting plastic ducks sitting in the water.
(Sarcasm, not serious)
seaboogie
@BillinGlendaleCA: Yeah, but when they get shot down and taken prisoner, I just don’t respect them – yuuuuuge losers – I like the ones who don’t get shot down.
Can you even wrap your mind around the days that we are living in?
seaboogie
@seaboogie: Basically, you don’t want to be Army. Cole was Army.
Oatler.
If anyone staged a military coup in this country, they’d have these sparkleboys collecting taxes with extreme license.
ET
It may have been an “honest” mistake which I doubt, but the complete and utter tone deaf nature of this on so Kay levels just shows their inner clueless at best and utter racist but subliminal, feelings at worst. First, this happened in Georgia. It would be bad anywhere in the US bit in a state of the old Confederacy is bad. The only worse place would have been in Tennessee. And it was the Air Force which seems to have some real issues around race that the other branches at least are trying to work on.
WereBear
My gob, it is smacked. And yes, I totally believe this “flew under their radar” because being sensitive to how other people think and feel is so bleeding heart.
TOP123
The comments on the AJC article are outright appalling. I basically never read comments on news sites; I suppose I am reminded why.
Adam L Silverman
@seaboogie: @Amir Khalid: @seaboogie: The US Navy is not also the US Air Force. They are two entirely different uniformed services. The US Air Force arose/developed out of the US Army Air Corps after World War II. These two services have separate Service Chiefs and Civilian Secretaries (Navy: Chief of Naval Operations and Secretary of the Navy, Air Force: Chief of Staff of the Air Force and Secretary of the Air Force), two separate administrative/generating forces (The Department of the Navy and the Department of the Air Force), and two separate logistics and acquisitions processes. They also have two completely different operational roles. Finally, USAF aviators do not land on aircraft carriers, only Naval aviators do. And Naval aircraft, as a result, come equipped with tailhooks to catch the landing wires strung across the decks when Naval aircraft land on aircraft carriers.
Adam L Silverman
@ET: It was most likely not even an honest mistake. It was most likely no one even considered it. I’ve served on numerous commemoration day or month planning teams in my job/role/assigned duties as a cultural advisor in the Army over the years. I can tell you honestly and with a great deal of amazement that things this tone deaf or worse are proposed and no one even considers what message they’re sending. The reason for this is that a lot of the officers, especially the more senior ones, have lived completely separated from everyone else in the US that isn’t involved with the military. The US military is like a very large gated community. Even for those living off post. They tend to cluster in neighborhoods and associate with their friends and colleagues from work. So there’s a bubble.
I was just having a discussion about these types of memorializaton days/months and events with a US Army Reserve 2 star last week. He’s an old friend of mine, but he’s usually not on an active assignment – meaning he does his Army reserve general thing a couple of days a week and works in the private sector at the same time. Currently he’s on an Active Reserve assignment. So his perspective is different from the active component/regular Army folks who do nothing but Army stuff every day, every week, every month until their careers end. We were talking about just how insular and compartmentalized they become. I explained to him once having to try to debug several African American History month events that were basically just tone deaf because they were put together by a group of white officers who just didn’t consider, because they likely couldn’t consider as they had no experiential baseline, how what they had planned would be perceived by minority personnel and others outside the military. In other words: this seemed reasonable to you and it doesn’t seem offensive, but what message are we actually conveying here. I had to write a really long memo laying all this out for our Public Affairs Officer who had concerns too, but needed support before she intervened with the Boss.
Even when I’ve been involved from stem to stern, stuff can go wrong. I once got a call at 2 AM while on TDY in Germany from a good friend and colleague/colonel I was assisting with Holocaust and Genocide Memorial month events. We had tried to program something dealing with Rwanda because we had a Rawandan general assigned. When it went up the chain from us into the admin side for approval someone nixed it. By the time my colleague caught it it was too late to fix and we had to do some tap dancing to avoid giving offense. This meant me having to go direct to our commanding general, as his cultural advisor, to arrange for a personal letter from him to the Rwandan officer. The other colonels and civil servants that nixed what we had planned weren’t bad people or bigots, they just looked at what we viewed in terms of money and time and never bothered to consider anything else.
Finally, I’ll leave everyone with the wonderful tale of when I had to stop a briefing because a colonel with a PhD in American History was giving a briefing with at least two African American colonels in the room started to explain why the Israeli-Palestinian problem set was a tar baby. As the actual subject matter expert on this in the room, and the one who provided the cultural prep in support of the briefing, I stopped him and recommended he use wicked or ill structured problem He asked why and I said I’d explain it on the break. Which I did. He told me, completely straight face – and I know this guy pretty well and I doubt he was lying – that he’d never heard tar baby used in the racist sense and only that its something you could get sucked into/stuck too. I recommended that if he wanted to use a tar based analogy, that he go with tar ball in the future, but best to stay away from it totally. He wasn’t a bigot, he was just insulated and clueless.
Adam L Silverman
@BillinGlendaleCA: I’m actually amazed this involves shooting. Most of the Air Force officers I know don’t have firearms, except for their Special Ops guys. Funny story: at the US Army War College I was supervising two Nepalese generals. One of them was also partially supervised by one of the Air Force colonels on the faculty – a really good guy. We were both given khukris as gifts. He came to my office and asked what he needed to do to treat it – these were the real deal that need a light sheen of oil or protectant on them. I asked him what kind of CLP (cleaner, lube, protectant) he used on his guns. He looked at me and said: “What guns? I don’t have any guns.” If I had been talking to one of my Army, Marine Corps, or even Navy colleagues a 1/2 hour, at least, conversation would have started on the relative merits of different CLPs. In his case I printed off the care directions from Khukri House’s website and handed them to him and then emailed him the link to the Frog Lube and Slip2000 websites.
Villago Delenda Est
This is what happens when you let fundie fuckwads take over a military academy.
Villago Delenda Est
@seaboogie: I was Army. Omnes was Army. raven was Army.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Adam L Silverman: My Dad worked for Lockheed which is right next to Dobbins. It’s a huge place. It’s got strong ties to the community. Some of my fondest memories are playing soccer in a youth league there. One of my weirdest is going to a Christmas party for the employee families and seeing half a dozen “Santas” sitting on thrones and lines of kids going up to see them.
“Why are there so many Santas, Mom?!?!” “They’re Santa’s helpers….”
:-/
It sounds to me like it was a community event like the soccer league, etc., etc., held on the base grounds and not just an AF event.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
(Who agrees that whoever put the event and the flyer together should have used their brain a little more.)