Open racism and closed containers

Allow me to recount an encounter at the counter, featuring politics, racism, and shitty beer.

Yesterday was ‘Wine Wednesday’ at my local liquor shop, offering 10% off all wines. Since very few of my conceptual costumes are easy to pull off while sober, I decided to stop in and grab a nice Riesling and some Old Style. While checking out I noticed a collection of Nobama Brew near the counter, featuring a sign reading as follows: “The sale of this product does not necessarily imply endorsement of any candidate by XXX liquor store.” I thought to myself, well, that’s nice, at least they are giving a slight nod to the nearly 40% of Obama supporters around here.

Just then, a prototypical redneck struts up to the counter, reads the disclaimer, and says to the cashier, “I am soooo disappointed in you.” The lovely woman working the register replies “I had to put that up, the owner didn’t want us running off any customers.” I’m hurriedly signing my receipt, hoping to bug out before he gets nasty. Too late! The redneck comes back with “Well, you can’t get too many jigaboos around here.”

I look up and shoot the cashier the universal facial expression for “WTF?!” She answers the redneck guy by noting that the first five people who mentioned being offended by the brew were all white people. Well, yeah. Mr. Racist Redneck didn’t get the numbers wrong. We live in a suburb which is only 4% African American, and the vast majority of Obama supporters are also white people. The data aren’t exactly the problem here.

Of course, the cashier was in a particularly sticky situation. She doesn’t want to lose the custom of either customer, just because one of them happens to be a racist fuckstick and the other one finds him intolerable. I’m not going to detail exactly what happened next, suffice to say that I was probably more polite than I ought to have been, although I did make it clear that I’d be voting for Obama. Jesus Asterisk Christ, the effing White Sox hat should have been a clue.

In these high-tension situations, you inevitably find yourself rethinking what you ought to have said over and over after the fact. What do you think I ought to have done?