Now that some of the furor surrounding the “Paula Deen Affair” has cooled somewhat, perhaps the whole thing can be placed in a context that exists but does not conform to the insistence that Americans enjoy complete freedom of speech. This has nothing to do with government although political correctness, not common sense, drives most of government-think and is reflective of this cancer on the society, i.e., that one may never speak his mind for fear of retaliation from both private and official sources.
On a governmental level, the retaliation can take the form of job-loss, for instance, while in the private sector one risks the loss of business or opportunity to use specific abilities for purposes of profit or even survival. This is what happened to Deen. During some sort of legal procedure, she testified that somewhere along the way she had said the word “nigger,” and the entities using her products and expertise deserted her en masse.
Actually, I’m not supposed to print that word (though “honky” would be okay, or “kite” or “wop” or “hillbilly” or “cracker” or “hymie,” Jesse’s favorite), but Lexington Herald-Leader columnist Merlene Davis, the paper’s resident race-baiter, used it in a column vilifying Deen—“rich white woman [little envy there?] calling black people niggers”—so I’m “entitled,” even though she’s black and I should know better.
Ms. Davis in a column once referred to President Bush as “the strutting cowboy, sidearms shiny with notched handles,” the hated western “hired gun,” in other words. The remark had to do with an NAACP convention during which its then-president, Julian Bond, said, “The Republican Party would have the American flag and the swastika flying side by side …”. That was okay because she and Bond were and still are black but Hitler was and most republicans were/are white, so neither the paper nor the NAACP did any expelling. Freedom of speech just works one way.
Well…Ms. Davis was not about to castigate Deen until that “rich white woman” said she only said that word once, which simply couldn’t be true, ergo, Ms. Davis calculated that Ms. Deen would answer to the Almighty for her sin of lying and using that awful term.
Anyway, according to Ms. Davis, there are more important news items deserving her superlative commentary, the first one being the impending death of Nelson Mandela, who she said was assumed to be dying of lung disease connected to his years in prison, which, of course is excellent, insightful commentary since he is only at the youthful age of 94 and probably should have lived to be at least 115—except for that jail term that ruined his health and sent him on his way at only 94. He reportedly had tuberculosis in prison but that was a very long time ago. More recently, he has suffered from prostate cancer and apparently healed.
Actually, the 27 years he spent in prison, understanding that he should never have been there though he was incarcerated for some kind of sabotage and refused earlier release because he would not renounce approval of armed resistance, might have been the very thing that made a very long life possible. Life-expectancy for men in South Africa is 50.3 years; for women, 48.5. So, Mandela has lived nearly twice as long as the average South African and may yet pull through this latest illness.
But it was on to more important things like the recent Supreme Court’s emasculation of the voting rights laws of the 1960s, according to Ms Davis. Now, the wicked southern states will not be governed by the feds in elections since there’s actually more discrimination in the north. Ms. Davis wrote that gerrymandering gone amuck will now preclude any blacks making it to office. Actually, some weird gerrymandering in states like Georgia have actually made it possible for blacks to make it to Congress.
But enough of that! Ms. Davis then took up the case of Trayvon Martin, the teenager killed in Sanford, Florida, last year by George Zimmerman, whose murder trial is in progress. Ms. Davis deemed that Zimmerman is as guilty as sin despite the fact that the first two prosecution witnesses actually made the case for his defense, according to news accounts. Mr. Zimmerman seems to be Latino but as a “White Latino” he is fair game for race-baiting, another “strutting cowboy, sidearms shiny with notched handles” and maybe reading Mein Kampf. Does that make Obama “White Kenyan,” perhaps reading Marx’s Das Kapital?
Then Ms. Davis celebrated Homosexual Heavenly Bliss, signed, sealed, and delivered by the SUPREMES, legalizing the hook-ups of people who do strange things with their “tools,” though only in certain states, not Kentucky. Surely, the first child conceived of anal intercourse (messy but then “no stain, no gain”) will happen early next year.
Imagine all that wisdom built on just one word—nigger—mentioned by Ms. Davis!
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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