This is an old story--and a badly uploaded picture--but an interesting one nonetheless. It comes from the 22 August 2008 San Francisco Chronicle. I found it in some files I was sorting yesterday.
The (fake) article refers to the supposed capture of Bigfoot by two men in Georgia, which was announced to a anxious--and bemused--world last summer. This story has it that Bigfoot was not a gorilla stuffed with roadkill, but a costume of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was one of the masterminds behind 9/11.
The joke works on a couple of levels, I think. One thing it does is call into question just how scary these terrorists are--by conflating them with the Bigfoot--who is best known for his absence. It also suggests that many terrorists may not be caught--they are as elusive as the beast.
What intrigues me, though, is the way that Bigfoot is used to dehumanize the terrorist. This is one of the functions of wildmen throughout history, to question the line between human and non-human. Here, in a very explicit way, the wildman is being used to suggest that terrorists are not human: they are dirty, stinking, hairy, they live in caves.
The trope of the wildman in America combines several different conflicting ideas. And here, we see those meanings shuffled to reveal the inhumanity of the beast--and, by extension, the inhumanity of some humans.
The (fake) article refers to the supposed capture of Bigfoot by two men in Georgia, which was announced to a anxious--and bemused--world last summer. This story has it that Bigfoot was not a gorilla stuffed with roadkill, but a costume of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was one of the masterminds behind 9/11.
The joke works on a couple of levels, I think. One thing it does is call into question just how scary these terrorists are--by conflating them with the Bigfoot--who is best known for his absence. It also suggests that many terrorists may not be caught--they are as elusive as the beast.
What intrigues me, though, is the way that Bigfoot is used to dehumanize the terrorist. This is one of the functions of wildmen throughout history, to question the line between human and non-human. Here, in a very explicit way, the wildman is being used to suggest that terrorists are not human: they are dirty, stinking, hairy, they live in caves.
The trope of the wildman in America combines several different conflicting ideas. And here, we see those meanings shuffled to reveal the inhumanity of the beast--and, by extension, the inhumanity of some humans.
