Friday, April 30, 2021

The Granite Old Party

The Greek myth of Pygmalion goes like this:

Pygmalion, king of Cyprus and a sculptor, fashioned a statue of a woman out of ivory, with which he fell in love. He prayed to Aphrodite, the goddess of love, who made the statue come to life, and Pygmalion married his creation. The story was George Bernard Shaw’s inspiration for his play Pygmalion, which, in turn, was the source for the musical My Fair Lady


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Republicans love statues too. They love statues so much--especially statues of  slaveowners and Confederate generals--that they can’t bear to see anyone touch a hair on their chinny-chin-chins. The Republicans’ embrace of nonliving granite and marble has led them in Florida to legislate into law an act imposing harsh punishment on anyone who disturbs the eternal rest of statues.

Under the act, any person who “willfully and maliciously” damages a memorial or other piece of historic property can be charged with a third-degree felony, which is punishable by up to five years in prison. Meanwhile, the felony charge will be upped to the second degree for those who destroy or topple such objects, which carries a sentence of up to 15 years.*

Rocks have never before been so beloved.


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While the GOPers of the Sunshine State were exhibiting their brand of rolling and rocking, their brethren in Oklahoma were engaged in a different project. They were trotting out legislation that would absolve drivers from blame if they plowed their vehicles, weighing 2 or 3 tons or more, into the bodies of human beings. 

When massive demonstrations against racial injustice erupted across the nation last summer, protesters used an increasingly common tactic to draw attention to their cause: swarming out onto major roads to temporarily paralyze traffic.

This method sometimes resulted in searing images of drivers plowing through crowds, causing serious injuries and in some cases, deaths.**


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In December 2015 John Edward Parsley made a big mistake. Angry at having to pay cash instead of having his credit card accepted, he smashed his pick-up truck through the front doors of the Alva Comfort Inn and Suites and into the lobby of that Oklahoma hostelry. He spent the following night as a guest in the Woods County Jail, held on a $1 million bond and charged with

two felony counts of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and one count of malicious injury to property valued at more than $1,000.***

Of course, he would really have been in trouble if he chipped a statue of Jefferson Davis.


Now, Mr. Parsley’s real mistake was not his blowing his top, but in destroying property. Had he waited 6 years and plowed into human beings he would be getting an all-clear signal from the Oklahoma State Legislature. 


To paraphrase Rodgers and Hammerstein:

Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain,

And the cars come smashing into humans.


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https://news.artnet.com/art-world/florida-felony-topple-confederate-monuments-1961315



Tuesday, April 13, 2021

A Republican Tells the Truth

By now, all of you should be au courant with the attempts by Republican-controlled state legislatures to enact a series of voter-suppression laws. The state that’s the poster-boy for this democracy-denying activity is Georgia, the state that fell to Joseph Biden in the recent presidential election and then sent two new Democratic senators to Washington.


The result of the 2020 election has sent Republicans into fits of conspiracy-seeking amid claims (all rejected in multiple court cases) of an election stolen by voter fraud.


However, mirabile dictu (as Cicero might put it), the governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, (who, in the past, has not proven to be the most scrupulous practitioner of voting ethics; when running for governor while serving as Georgia’s secretary of state, he refused to recuse himself from supervising his own election) proclaimed loud and clear that the new voting legislation “has nothing to do with potential fraud or not.” (1) 


What a breath of fresh air! No BS about dead people voting or smuggled ballots or the rest of the crap that other GOPers were peddling. The Georgia Republicans were simply intent upon breaking a system that worked perfectly in order to keep thousands of fellow Peach Staters from voting because they would mark their ballots for the wrong party. 


One provision of the new laws that got the attention even of that noted pinwheel Lindsey Graham, GOP senator from South Carolina, was the criminalization of volunteers’ providing drink or food to voters waiting on line. 

Chris Wallace: “Senator, why on earth, if Americans are willing to wait hours to vote, would you make it a crime for people to come and give them a bottle of water?”

Graham: “Well, all I can say is that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, I agree with you there.” (2)

Governor Kemp, however, saw something very American about such a ban:

"They can order a pizza," Kemp said of voters waiting to vote. "They can order Grubhub or Uber Eats, right?” (3)

In other words, freebee handouts are an un-American criminal offense—but capitalism should be rewarded.


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The Moral:


In Georgia, that Kit Kat must be purchased!


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(1)  https://www.theroot.com/georgia-governor-says-states-voter-suppression-law-isnt-1846599302


(2)  https://www.thedailybeast.com/chris-wallace-grills-lindsey-graham-on-georgia-voting-law-banning-giving-voters-water


(3)  https://news.yahoo.com/georgia-gov-brian-kemp-says-175707994.html