Macaca:“a genus of Old World monkeys including the rhesus monkey (M. mulatta) and other macaques” - Merriam Webster’s Dictionary
Macaque: “any monkey of the genus Macaca, including the rhesus monkey and Barbary ape, having prominent cheekbones and usually a long tale.”- The Oxford Dictionary

Senator George Allen recently introduced an ironic twist into the Virginia senate race by referring to an aide of his opponent, James Webb, as a “macaca”.Mr. Allen later claimed that he had no idea what the word meant, which is an interesting response for an educated man who, one would suspect, would not call a chair a table, a tree a rock, nor a man a monkey unless it were intentional.The aide, S.R. Sidarth, is of Indian descent and aside from being noticeably of Asian heritage among the congregated white Republicans, was sporting a Mohawk hair style.Senator Allen did not mumble the word, nor say it under his breath, but repeated it several times in an insulting way while clearly singling out his intended target with comments such as “This fellow here, over here with the yellow shirt, Macaca, or whatever his name is, he’s with my opponent” and “give a welcome to Macaca here.Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia.”

The Republican effort to play the race card is a well-established campaign tactic in recent elections.Many Republican candidates for high office, such as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, have visited the segregationist BobJonesUniversity in order to gain the allegiance of Southern whites with racist tendencies.George Bush Sr. infamously played up the Willie Horton scandal in order to defeat Michael Dukakis, inspiring fear among suburban whites that his Democratic opponent would set loose on society an army of black felons.Republican candidates from the South, such as Trent Lott, have in recent years been embarrassed by revelations of comments and actions that reflected enthusiasm for the Confederate legacy.Mr. Allen himself had been revealed to be a Confederate sympathizer based upon photographs of him with the Confederate flag and an admission that he has kept such a flag in his home.In 1984 he opposed establishment of a Virginia holiday honoring Martin Luther King, and while governor was responsible for a proclamation honoring Confederate History Month.There is no disputing the bravery of the Confederate soldiers, but there is also no denying that it is fundamentally racist and unpatriotic to profess support for a Southern movement that was founded on the principles of slavery and secession from the nation.

An ironic undercurrent to Mr. Allen’s remarks, and to similar attitudes in the Republican party, is the denial of our species’ link to a shared ancestry with monkeys and apes.Despite DNA analysis proving conclusively that humans are closely related to monkeys, chimpanzees, and gorillas, and could only have descended from a common ancestral line, the Christian base in the country clings to the belief that man appeared on Earth by a divine act of creation.Despite Darwin’s research and overwhelming scientific evidence demonstrating the validity of evolution, a visceral fear of seeing man as an evolved monkey drives much of the population to cling to Creationism and Intelligent Design.By seeking to exploit the most base apprehensions and prejudices of Christian whites, politicians such as Mr. Allen tap into these visceral currents relating to fear of what is “non-human” and “non-white” – in essence, all that is foreign, dark, and suggestive of man’s hairier cousins.

What would the world look like with a knuckle dragger, God forbid, as president of the United States? Perhaps the leader of the free world would disdain facts and human reason in order to make decisions according to the feeling in his gut.Other world leaders would be assessed not by their policies or words, but by the instinctual reaction produced by looking them in the eyes.An attitude of “might is right” would perhaps course through the upper levels of governmental power, as the biggest gorilla sought to spread the power of America throughout the world with war and belligerent chest thumping.Discourse, respect, and humility would remain faint hopes for a later period of man’s evolution.

In the wake of Mr. Allen’s remarks last month, an interesting development has been the recent announcement of a major archeological find, a fossil of the earliest child found in the human evolutionary line.The fossils, about 3 million years old and found in Ethiopia, are of a child of the Australopithecus afarensis species.The skeleton showed clear signs of being in a transitional evolutionary phase and supported the view that the human ancestor afarensis walked upright, but also had arms and shoulders that allowed for climbing and swinging in trees.

While Mr. Allen sought furiously to leap through the uproar over his macaca remarks, it was later revealed that the candidate who has assiduously courted the religious right is in fact partly of Jewish descent.Mr. Allen and his mother claimed that this fact was kept from him until early September, though this secrecy and his apparent failure to explore his maternal family’s past treatment by the Nazis makes one wonder at the true circumstance of the omission.In a world in which genetic differences between races, and even between humans and simian cousins such as the chimpanzee, are minimal, perhaps Mr. Allen is finding that seeking superiority through prejudice and self-elevation is a perilous course.

And where was Mr. Allen’s own mother, she of the Jewish Lumbroso family, born?
Tunisia, just a few African trees from Ethiopia, where the afarensis child fossil was found.

[This article was based in part on facts revealed in several NY Times articles in August and September 2006]