Saving the Country vs. Black jokes

8/9/09

This won't be the first time I've gone out on a limb and risked relationships. I'm known in some circles only by the bad jokes I tell - usually at the expense of others, running the gamut of their looks, their intelligence, their behavior - anything that strikes me funny at the moment. I could have been another Don Rickles if I had a longer attention span and, of course, ambition.

But I'm a little older now and my agenda is more developed, definitely more political, and I'm more sensitive to other people's feelings... when merited. If you say something stupid, I can probably come up with an occasion when I said something stupider.

I have joined - and unjoined, too - what I call the WWW (world wide web) of "patriotic resistance movements," online groups of people who are using the internet to protest the problems we see in our governance, mistakes we believe are being made by the Administration and by the Congress. If you've never visited one of these web sites and read the message boards, there are many thoughtful and intelligent people who scour the internet for news and information about what the government is doing or planning to do to us.

The best of these Web Groups point us in the direction of historical documents (the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers) so we can learn how government is supposed to work and what our responsibilities are as U.S. citizens.

There are many thoughtful and intellectually stimulating opinions that I appreciate, some I can really sink my teeth into.

Then there are those of you with no couth, hardly a civil bone in your bodies, and live in the perennial stratosphere of the 10-year-old boy who practices farting as he walks through a crowd.

And then there are a few of you who continue to send me email jokes about the president's race, heritage or his family's race or heritage.

I don't find those jokes funny, clever, or helpful. If I see you and one of your signs at a Tea Party rally I'll spray paint over it.

Grow the hell up. If send them again you'll find yourself not only in my SPAM folder but your name will be posted here on The Elvis Chronicles, in the Tiger's cage, where you'll be named for the putz you are.

Signed,
Tiger