Your Tattlesnake admits to being slightly gobsmacked by reading the news lately. First, we have the regressive far-right clodhoppers down in the Lone Star Beer State rewriting the school textbooks for the entire country, inserting such gems as eliminating any reference to the history of institutional racism in America (slavery never existed?); praising Confederate generalship (they lost the war, remember?); invoking Moses as an inspiration for the Constitution, while practically ignoring Jefferson, Franklin, the Age of Enlightenment, and the reasons for the separation of church and state; disregarding the Mexicans who died alongside Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett defending the Alamo; promoting the jingoistic myth of ‘American exceptionalism’ and the non-existent ‘free market economy’; and even peevishly describing our form of government as a “Constitutional Republic” rather than the “Democratic Republic” it has been called since our founding because, you know, any phrase containing the word “Democrat” has to be inherently evil and unpatriotic. No doubt even some Creationist buffoonery is included for the comic relief of the smarter students.
How did a bunch of piss-drunk mouth breathers, psychotic snake shooters and half-assed Holy Rollers who would install an empty-headed slouch like Junior Bush as their governor and follow him with a vain numbskull like Rick Perry ever get such clout? Well, one thing’s for sure – you’ll never get the answer to that question from one of their ‘abridged-for-stupidity’ textbooks.
I feel sorry for our kids – even more than in previous generations they are being batter-dipped and deep-fried in a vat of convoluted hooey by a bunch of uneducated, narrow-minded yahoos who think faith equates to knowledge and facts are as malleable as a pile of fresh horse manure. Third-world country, here we come.
Conversely, down in the fetid armpit of poverty-row Dark Ages America, in the homophobe paradise of Fulton, Mississippi, a lesbian teenager is suing the local school for not allowing her to bring her gal pal as a prom date – in fact, the authorities cancelled the whole damn prom rather than permit such twenty-first century San Francisco-style perfidy to undermine the town’s Taliban morality.
As the lesbian teen in question, 18-year-old Constance McMillen, told CBS’ News, “I explained to him that you can’t pretend like there’s not gay people at our school, and if you tell people they can’t bring [a] same-sex date, that is discrimination to them.”
Wait a minute, putting aside Constance’s prom problem, she’s saying there are openly gay people in Missi-fracking-ssippi? When was the last time you heard anyone living in mushmouth Haley Barbour’s Stinking State of ‘Grace’ (or is that ‘grease’?) admit they were gay, especially a high school kid? Why, shut my mouth and call me Foghorn!
Who knows, maybe the students forced to read that skunky rot passed off as a textbook by the Texas tyrants are smarter than we think and will laugh it off; perhaps times are moving forward faster than the howling hordes of retrograde simpletons can change, no matter what they do. There may be hope yet, even in the last-to-know, slow-flowing mud of Mississippi, always packed with crackers and nuts and, now – will wonders never cease? — some openly gay folks as well.
© 2010 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.
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