PAULA DEEN EASY TARGET

 

Hearing now about a retired general being "targeted." I heard the news announcer say the general, whose name I don't remember and don't care enough to look up, has been made cognizant that he is now targeted. When I heard, "target," it rang the bell for the word of the day. Targeting is what our government is doing to American citizens now. The media targets people, goes after them in a character assassination way until they are defeated. Republicans have been targeting throughout my lifetime. When one is destroyed, then somebody else gets targeted. Paula Deen was targeted and is being destroyed over an issue of freedom of speech, not racism. Her freedom of speech has been radically denied. She used a key word. The only thing I can make of this media feeding frenzy over the word nigger is we have no freedom of speech anymore. I could date this Paula Deen character assassination as the final announcement that freedom of speech no longer applies in America. We've always known that. I knew it in my teen years back in the Fifties. So did everybody I knew. We didn't know it articulately or politically. It was just in the air understood. Then, communism was the big threat to national security. Next it was terrorism and now it's the word nigger. Any kind of expressed sympathy with Russia was automatically suspect in the Fifties and Sixties. Progressive magazines were always under threat from the right. Now we have a long list of key words computer programs are set to find in any given text. The news about surveillance of the American people has been news all my life.

I'm sensing that I see the beginnings of a backlash. Women of the South Unite! Stand Up With Paula. It is the South that is being targeted in this offense as well as women. Paula Deen is a name and a face. A target. I saw that a publisher of her cookbook is withdrawing it. I saw that amazon is selling her new cookbook like crazy now. Good. I want to see Paula Deen come out of this better than she went into it. The prayers of the women of the South will make a difference. The only thing I have to say to Yankee media is, Leave the South alone; you don't understand anything about the South, don't intend to and cannot be taught. That's like telling a republican to leave off the obsession with debunking science. The media people are laughing at her and having a great time because she breaks down so well on camera and she doesn't really mean it, all that shit they do to targets. I call them the evil ones. Paula Deen is a charming Southern woman. It doesn't mean she has no access to an inner hard core business woman who has had to teach herself how to stand up to a man's face and straighten him out. She's a Southern woman. She's on trial, too, for not conforming to the Yankee code, Yankee political correctness. They'll have a good time with Paula, bashing the South, the Confederacy, women, freedom of speech. They'll probably bring abortion and creationism into the mix before the momentum has exhausted itself and the other story this one is covering up as a smokescreen is settled or forgotten.

One way I can see a measure of change in retrospect is to remember the quotation from CIA director, Wm Casey, Reagan appointee, 1981, "We'll know our disinformation campaign is complete when everything the American people believe is false." Was this not a statement of purpose? And here we are. Corporate media reports what they're told from the top down. Editorials are what they're told to be from the top down. Like tv wrestling. Censored on the inside. No need for government censorship. Our media has no connection to the people of the United States of America because they've all turned into corporate propaganda organs, like television networks. In 1981 when this remark was made by Casey, we knew something dark was up with the Reagan Junta. But it didn't start there. Nixon created a name for himself, Tricky Dick, that simply identified him a republican. He was part of Joe McCarthy's mob with Roy Cohn in the early 1950s, commie hunters, character assassins. The republicans were then as they are today. I'm glad to be able in this time to report the karma of these targeting assassins of the Fifties. Joe McCarthy drank himself to death. Roy Cohn died of AIDS. Nixon went out in historical shame.

photo by ty butler

In the 1950s people were targeted for character assassination by calling them communists. Today Paula Deen is a targeted drone strike out of the blue for exercising freedom of speech in America. Thirty-two years after the statement of purpose by Director Casey, Paula Deen has had her right to freedom of speech excessively violated, tragically violated, herself reviled as a racist, OMG, held for a pariah on all the networks, falsely charged on all counts. I say falsely, because it all comes under freedom of speech. For the world to see, a target. At the Old Boys Club they're raising their drinks to a toast. This is why the rest of the world has come to see Americans insane. I can find no convincing argument to counter it. We've reached the place that everything coming to us through the corporate media is false. This is what characterizes us as Americans in today's international world. A good time to stay at home, get a blankie, crawl under it and go to sleep. What can I do when I wake up? Read Andre Gide, then watch the video of My Dinner With Andre and have some good Ethiopian coffee. That's as good a way as I can think of to start a day.

 

 

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PAULA DEEN AINT SO BAD

I think of the Eastern European countries that lived under Soviet rule for half a century when I see the step-by-step transition the Reagan Revolution is taking us through to police state, which is here now. It's even out in the open. Our American freedoms are being shut down, systematically, one at a time, by republican legislation and the republican supreme court. I think of Latvia and Estonia, peaceful countries that fell under the Soviet occupation unto cultural depression. I see that cultural depression occurring in USA as police state moves in, dismantling democracy with a popular zeal. Police state is not rule by intelligence. American white men have proven over the last half century that white men are not intelligent rulers. Neither are any other kind of men. It is time for women to come forward. Though when they do, they get shut down by the white man Old Boy Network. Paula Deen is now experiencing the Martha Stewart treatment and the Loraine Helmsley treatment, what happens in America when a woman gets a little too much money (power). It's time to shut her down. Oprah was not a problem. She was black. No admittance to the Old Boy Network no matter how much money she has. Paula Deen's misfortune is being a hyper successful white woman in America.

I've been seeing articles about her use of the word nigger. I've seen an interview with a black man who has known her well for many years. He told about black people who have worked for her for a long time with responsible positions, regarded with respect and friendship. It's like the time Jimmy the Greek used the enword and was put off the air almost immediately. They wanted rid of him. He had a little bit too much of a working class air about him. He wasn't bland enough. A few days ago I saw a clip from a Bill Maher show where a woman Maher identified as Southern, evidently a liberal journalist, made the remark that anyone who is a racist is evil. I've been seeing/hearing this over and over. Paula Deen said nigger; therefore, she's evil. I have a feeling calling somebody evil for use of a word that has fallen out of media favor is an act, itself, of evil. This woman so proud of identifying herself liberal made me question liberal. The first quarter century of the Reagan Revolution made liberal a word that made liberals shy of owning up to. Then it became a word to be proud of, a reaction. Now that it's an identity to be proud of, the ridiculous surfaces.

If having even the remotest racist thought is evil, then everybody on earth is evil. Back to the Christian square one; we're born in sin, born bad to be made good by beatings and beratings. The Reagan Revolution is about racism. Taking money away from "programs" and benefits to help black people survive in the most racist nation on earth is the character of the Reagan model the republicans of today parrot. He and the Reagan white house staff called MLK, Martin Lucifer Coon. The Supremes have now identified themselves as the Roberts KKKourt racists, which we already knew. We have an evil supreme court. Duh. Don't think any of our white congressmen or senators or their staffs give a shit about African Americans. They represent the racist rich. They pretend for the show, looks bad, and when it comes to legislation, they're racists. The republican party became the racist party in 1954, when the democrat party turned from exclusion to inclusion. The democrat racists of the South turned into republicans overnight. Before, democrat was the racist party. Now that the South is solid republican, it does not mean all Southerners are racist. Most of the people I know are not. Many I know are. One of my racist friends at age 30 is still friends with his black friends he knew all the way through school. He has another black friend he knew as his dad's friend growing up. And I'm not talking step-n-fetch-it friends. I mean equal others. Yet, as a good ol' Southern boy, he don't like niggers. I don't even try to figure it out.

My friend Swami Yogeshananda, who is in his 90s now, living in a Hindu monastery in the southern California mountains, said years ago in conversation that Southerners like the individual, not the race. He said in the North they like the race, not the individual. Whether or not that is a flawless rule of thumb isn't why I'm bringing it up. What I'm getting at is my racist friend, Southern Appalachian bred-and-buttered, likes the individuals he knows, but not the race, an idea. Racism is totally an idea. Race, itself, is totally a learned idea. Of course, how it acts out is another thing. My friend Carole told me of the time she offered a book she'd just finished, a biography of Sidney Poitier, to an elderly woman friend who couldn't even touch the book when she saw the black face on the cover. Didn't want to hear about it, nothing. Carole is every bit as Southern as her friend and has no racism in her. It had never entered her mind the other woman could be so locked down. Many are. Racism is not strictly a white issue. There was a time I worked for a year with a black woman from Baltimore. The racism in her was off-putting for the racism itself, not that I cared she looked down on me for being a cracker. The white people look down on me, too, for not having money, position or status, and especially for being that way by will.

The Paula Deen case brings to mind Patti Smith. If she had a tv show, was making lots and lots of money with a network contract, and somebody pointed out that back in the late 70s she recorded a song that she wrote, Rock n Roll Nigger. "Baby, baby, baby, I'm a rock n roll nigger! Outside of society---that's where I wanna be! Nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger!" She'd be off the air and a scandal from hell. The queen of punk said the enword! OMG. But then, there's the saving grace of punk: punk doesn't give a shit. Same with rap. The comedy of this time in history is that the enword is even more unacceptable in the white middle class than fuck, what used to be the efword. And I'm talking about the South. You can say fuck all you want, except in church and coffee shops. In the working class, the enword and the efword are used at will, primarily in reaction to the middle class, the management class, the bosses, enforcers of political correctness, including not smoking. They're as bad as preachers' wives in the old ways. The ruling class uses the enword freely. They're racists and don't give a shit who knows it.  Hence: the republican party is systematically dismantling democracy in a time when people of color in the electorate now outnumber white. Our entire American way of life is being shut down by white racism, and we can't say the enword. LMAO.

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