Ladies and Gentlemen... It's days like today when, if I were running the planet, that I would take a State -- say, Arizona -- and scrape all the Wingnut Teabag Fundamentalist proto-nazi White Supremacist Racist Masters Of The Universe up from the rest of These United States, drop them there, then fence the entire area off and patrol its borders as if the rest of our lives depended on it.
Artists who painted a mural at Miller Valley Elementary School in Prescott, AZ, depicting four students -- the most prominent being a Hispanic boy -- were asked to lighten the faces of the four images. Well, not asked, really. Told.
R.E. Wall And Pamela J. Smith Of The Prescott Downtown Mural
Project, Directed To Make Hispanic Boy Into Little White Boy
(Photo: Hinshaw / Associated Press / NY Daily News, 6-4-10)
R.E. Wall, the artist who heads the Prescott Downtown Mural Project, said that during the months of work on the painting, passersby regularly shouted racially-charged comments and insults at his group while they were creating the mural.
The New York Daily News quoted Wall, describing people driving past and frequently yelled comments such as " 'You're desecrating our school,' 'Get the ni---- off the wall,' 'Get the sp-- off the wall,' ". Wall said, "The pressure stayed up consistently. We had two months of [people in] cars shouting at us."
Meanwhile, in South Carolina, Republican State Senator Jake Knotts is a supporter of Republican Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer to be the GOP candidate for Governor. There's a state primary coming up, and Bauer's GOP challenger is Nikki Haley, whose parents are South Asian Sikhs -- she is a conservative, Republican American who identifies herself as a christian.
In a radio broadcast, Knotts referred to Haley, and President Obama, as "fucking raghead[s]".
"We got a raghead in Washington; we don't need one in South Carolina," Knotts said more than once. "She's a raghead that's ashamed of her religion trying to hide it behind being Methodist for political reasons" ... "We need a good Christian to be our governor," he said. "She's hiding her religion. She ought to be proud of it. I'm proud of my god."
Knotts says he believes Haley's father has been sending letters to India saying that Haley is the first Sikh running for high office in America. He says her father walks around Lexington wearing a turban. "We're at war over there," Knotts said. Asked to clarify, he said he did not mean the United States was at war with India, but was at war with "foreign countries."
State Senator Jake Knotts (R-Fat, Racist)
A little later, Knott released a statement that amounted to a nudge-nudge, wink-wink, claiming the radio program was a "freewheeling, anything-goes Internet radio show that is broadcast from a pub... If it had been recorded, the public would be able to hear firsthand that my 'raghead' comments about Obama and Haley were intended in jest... It's like a local political version of Saturday Night Live, which is actually where the joke came from. I still believe Ms. Haley is pretending to be someone she is not, much as Obama did, but I do apologize to both for an unintended slur."
Unintended. Yeah... People like Ol' Jake didn't intend to support segregation, the Klan, or lynchings, either. Not at all -- hey, they had no idear how stuff like that coulda happened...
Discussing this in the context of Arizona's new, arguably racist state immigration law, a blog commentator noted [paragraphing added]:
Remember where you were when you could still laugh about teabaggers and racists and Arizonans, because funny time is almost over.
If the unemployment keeps up — one in five adult white males has no job and will never have a job again — and people keep walking away from their stucco heaps they can’t afford and the states and cities and counties and towns keep passing their aggressive racist laws to rile up the trash even more, shit’s going to very soon become very bad...
..and whether it’s the National Guard having wars in the Sunbelt Exurbs against armies of crazy old white people who are finally using their hundreds of millions of guns, or whole Latino neighborhoods burned to the ground the way the Klan used to burn down black neighborhoods a century ago, we are in for a long dark night and no light-colored paint is going to fix that.
Apparently I'm not the only one who feels we're already deep in the Weimarzeit.
...and, there are approximately 11 other states where
New Local
Americans With Nothing To Hide (Coming - The Electronic Version!)
What bothers me is that the number of people sufficiently aware of historical precedent to make the comparison appear to be very few -- and so, not many people will recall what form of government came after The Weimar Republic.
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