By Matt Rooney
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Governor Murphy raised eyebrows on Monday by tweeting a photo of a donkey and a very creepy social-distancing warning to New Jerseyans:
“So to all the jackasses out there who we now have to carry to make sure we don’t have make life worse than the rest of us, we know who you are and we won’t relent.”
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Here’s the tweet:
To all the jackasses out there who we now have to carry – get with the program. We know who you are and we will not relent until we have 100% compliance. pic.twitter.com/b0ic1maDgT
— Governor Phil Murphy (@GovMurphy) April 6, 2020
So the implication is that those who are social distancing, working on the front lines, and doing the ‘heavy lifting’ to overcome COVID-19 are carrying the ‘jackasses’ – those who refuse to “comply” – on their backs through a proverbial minefield.
Murphy (or his team) undoubtedly pulled the photo from a popular Internet meme; the caption usually reads as follows:
“This picture [is] from World War II, a soldier carrying a donkey. It is not that the soldier loves donkeys or has some sort of perversion. What’s happening is that the field is mined and that if the donkey was free to wander as it pleased, it would likely detonate a charge and kill everyone. The moral of the story is that during difficult times the first ones you have to keep under control are the jackasses who don’t understand the danger and do as they please.”
One problem… that’s not what the photo depicts. At all.
There is no minefield.
It’s not even World War II.
According to Snopes.com, “[t]he picture actually dates from 1958, during the Algerian War (i.e., a war for independence waged against French forces in Colonial Algeria). And it depicts a starving donkey that was rescued by a member of the French Foreign Legion who carried it back to his base, where the animal was nursed back to health, given the name “Bambi,” and adopted as a unit mascot.”
“Donkeys may create dangerous situations (unwittingly or otherwise) in other circumstances,” the Snopes team concluded, “but not in the one captured in the photograph displayed above.”
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