The Delonas cartoon was offensive for reasons unrelated to race. No sane person enjoyed seeing or reading about police killing the chimpanzee. They may as well have killed Bonzo. Compounding the horror of this poor animal drawn dead and bleeding was the knowledge of its gruesome attack on a woman, who at the time was in critical condition…

If (big if) [Doug] Marlette had considered the chimpanzee as a vehicle for some larger point, he never would have made it a pivot point for anything that could be associated with the nation’s first African American president. No one was more attuned to the workings of the unconscious mind or more profoundly moved by the civil rights struggles against the terrorist sons of his native South. Two cops shooting an animal historically employed to portray blacks as less than human — in the context of a black president’s seminal piece of legislation — would have been not only morally repugnant but just not funny.