Tarzan Exhibit in Paris Museum Manages to Fire Salvo at Sarah Palin

What does the (real-life) governor of Alaska have to do with the jungles of Africa, you might ask, especially in the context of a fictional character? That is the question to ask regarding a state museum, Jacques Chirac's Musée des Arts Premiers (or Quai Branly), which is holding an exhibit on the most enduring character of Edgar Rice Burroughs, entitled Tarzan! ou Rousseau chez les Waziri (18th-century-type subtitle added just to give it a higher pseudo-cultural touch).

Well, it just so happens that the exhibit (under gay museum director Stéphane Martin) features a (French) Tarzan magazine (it looks like a Sunday strip, but it is really four Rex Maxon dailies from the 1940s, subsequently colored and brought upon the same magazine cover page) before and after a number of panels were censored by the French. Fair enough. But then read the accompanying museum caption…

After speaking tongue-in-cheek of "the associations of Puritan America" putting an end to "that horror" — a nude sequence in Tarzan and His Mate (1934) — it continues with censorship of the French Tarzan comic of 1947:

The French control commission, invested as much by the Catholic associations as by the do-gooders of the French Communist Party, will bring about the banning of [the magazine] Tarzan.

So far, so good. But look what comes then, in the final sentence: an entirely gratuitous, an entirely caricatural, and an entirely erroneous slap at jungle inhabitant Sarah Palin!

It would seem that a certain Sarah Palin is carrying on the fight…