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Snapping Turtle Talk

In the late 1970s, my daughter, Gail, and I got into our Corvair, and drove to the American South, because she was interested in going to a college or university in that region of the nation.  (I had encouraged our children to carve out their own space--which included where they went to school--and not simply follow an older sibling to a university.)  We went to North Carolina, and Duke, Georgia, the University of the South, and other schools.

To put the matter crudely, the trip scared the s**t out of me because we had a car radio.  I had never heard such blatent racism from local radio stations!  The Civil War, I decided, was not yet over!

Gail did go to school, in North Carolina, for two years before transferring to the University of Arizona in Tucson.  But the Civil War is still not yet over, and in many ways, the same issues remain.  It is no longer legal to own slaves in the U.S., but attitudes of racial superiority are everywhere.  Whether we shall be, "one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all", remains.  Texas has a vigorous secessionist movement.  South Carolina is not a happy camper.  Ronald Reagan's mindless slogan that "government is the problem, not the solution", is a Tea Party mantra:  Ohmmm!  That we supposedly are a White Christian nation, chosen by God and the Koch Brothers to save the world from brown- and black-skinned people, remains.  That Real America is not "Up North", remains.  That the Christian religion is the One, True, and Holy faith, remains.

This whole Tea Party business, that has infected the Republican Party with an attitude that is resistant to antibiotics and reason, is nothing new.  It is the ugliest side of the Civil War in 21st Century clothing.  It is ignorant White Anglo Saxon superiority to Black people, Brown people, Asians, and any immigrant who did not come from the First Garden of Eden, located in England and Europe.  No matter that the original British colonists ate each other to avoid starvation:  they were Christian cannibals!  Our cannibals.  No matter that Jesus was a Jew and that the Pope is a Catholic:  they have come around to fundamentalist ways of thinking!  We know . . . We know that we . . . We White, Protestant Americans are God's Chosen People!  And that government is the problem, not the solution!  Might as well add that taxes are too high, too, even if they have reached nearly all-time lows.  We are talking about beliefs, here, not facts.  And climate change is a hoax, and evolution is a lie from the deepest pit of Hell!

Turtle Talk.  Flat Earth talk.  Turtles all the way down!  God is in his Heaven, and Michele Bachmann is in Minnesota.  Ted Cruz is in Texas.  And the Tea Party House of Representatives is out to lunch, waiting for the Apocalypse when the rough places will be made smooth, and the swamps will drain, and all those damned immigrants will go back to where they came from:  Mexico, and Guatemala, and China and Japan.  And England and Ireland and Italy and Norway.

Then new soil will roll out over the plains, and the Buffalo will return.  But more about that another time.


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