Rosalea Barker: Marbled egg on the face

(For those of you who don’t know how to make a marbled egg: Boil an egg. Crack its shell. Soak it in tea.)

Trust me to have a Tuesday free of the Internet and telly on the very day that a news cycle rolls into town and out again with the destructive force of a Kansas funnel cloud. I missed it all!

I’m talking about the barnyard flap over at the US Department of Agriculture, wherein an employee was fired for racist comments then invited to return after it is discovered that the Internet video showing her making those comments was edited to take them out of context. You can read the transcript of Wednesday night’s PBS Newshour story on the matter here.

The video had been posted on an anti-big government website in response to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s recent statement that elements within the Tea Party movement are racist. The knee jerk reaction of the USDA and the White House to the video was as comical as a townie in a cowshed trying to milk a bull.

The kindest interpretation of the media and Administration’s ineptitude would be that it is summer, after all, so DC is suffering its yearly Intern Infestation. Perhaps some gormless, eager college student with three semesters of a Mass Communications degree under its belt was in charge of the response to the website posting.

What with those three semesters having been taken up with “On-Screen Communication”, “How to Use Social Networking Sites”, and “Geodata for Fun and Wicked Graphics”, leaving no time for fuddy-duddy old crap like “Research”, PLUS the current heatwave, a case of the vapors was to be expected. Not to mention the ensuing hysteria.

But if I might put in a good word for the townies—the problem isn’t that they didn’t grow up on a farm; the problem is that there ain’t enough of them in the Democratic Party. Small-town townies, I mean. I don’t know how many times in the past ten years I’ve been gobsmacked by the Effete-in-the-Mouth reactions of the Dems to rightwing taunts and tricks. Things that any self-respecting small-townie would know deserved either a considered approach or being roundly ignored.

I believe “You’ll keep” is the technical term for it.

Here’s an idea: Let’s all send a packet of Commonsense seeds to our Democrat friends so they can grow some. On their big-city condo patios.

I’m sorry? Who you callin’ a stadtist?

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

--PEACE—

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