T-D's barbaric illustration

First of all, back to Greg: Yeah, I thought that whole "Who Runs Richmond" in the T-D piece was just — oh, I don't know — redundant? Who couldn't name the usual suspects as the owners — lock, stock and barrel — of this town? My favorite part was when Gene Trani and Bill Goodwin are surveying the city from the Federal Reserve Building looking for a spot to put the new VCU School of Engineering. Despite other "likely sites," Goodwin looks at the corner of Main and Belvidere, which, the story says, "the university was struggling to renovate as the new home of its School of the Arts."
The story paints it as this almost Biblical moment: That's where it should go, Goodwin said.
I almost expected next to read, "And it was good."
Anyway, I wanted to post about something completely different until you sidetracked me, Greg.
You know, a couple of weeks ago the NCAA announced it is cracking down on the use of American Indian names, mascots and images deemed offensive to some Native Americans. Teams called the Braves or Tribe or Redskins or Savages or, say, the Barbaric Scalpers would be prohibited from displaying images on uniforms or having mascots perform at tournaments and so forth. This decision has been widely blasted but having seen yesterday's Times-Dispatch I'm thinking we need a similar oversight board for newspaper illustrations.
Alongside A. Barton Hinkle's well-written, well-thought-out, multisyllabic Op/Ed piece on the iBook debacle (By the way, as my grandmother would say, Basta! Is there anyone out there who hasn't written about it? Oh, wait! I have no idea how the iBook Stampede affected Cynthia McMullen's cats!) was this uncredited "illustration" of a flared-nostriled, curly-cue nippled, war-painted American Indian holding an iBook, representing the barbarians at the RIR gate. Blinding cultural insensitivity aside, no wonder no one claimed credit for the drawing! It looked as if it had been scrawled by someone who was rejected by the correspondence art school because they couldn't draw Winky. And blinding cultural insensitivity not aside — what were they thinking? I've been in these meetings where you try carefully to find a piece of art that conveys the meaning of the story and for the life of me I can't imagine that Hinkle was sitting there nodding his head, "Yes, yes, crazed savage Indian. I like it." Score another point for the T-D and its stirring of the Melting Pot yet again.