A local news radio station has provided me with a couple of guffaws during my daily commute. Both had to do with names.
First was a report from some Web competition by what sounded like a Mr. Larry Maggot. I'm pleased to learn that the reporter's name is actually Larry Magid. At the time, I imagined a reporting team of Larry Maggot, Bernie Cockroach, and Wally Dungbeetle.
Second was the report of a Henry Duque, a six-year member of the California Public Utilities Commission, who was being booted out of his $107K position for pouring dough into a company that is regulated by the commission. Oops. But the bit that appealed to my inner 5-year-old was that the reporter pronounced his name as "Henry Dookie".
Poor Mr. Dookie.
This subject gets me so riled I can barely think, let alone type.
How can anyone believe that this is going to help? The folks filing the lawsuits insist that it is not their intention to get rich. "The intent is to have justice served." How noble. Proponents of reparations hope the lawsuits will spark a national conversation about race relations and the impacts of slavery. I'm sure there are more rational ways of raising the issue or, more correctly, continuing the dialog that's been ongoing for 300 years. If they only want conversation, then they should head for a coffee house and not a courtroom.
All I hear the reparations folks saying is that black is to be pitied and white is to be punished. Years of Great Society programs are not enough. A national guilt so strong it spawned neuroses like political correctness is not enough. What these people want is a river of cash to rush through the prisons and the ghettos, washing away all the squalor. Enough cash and the black will rise while the white sinks. This is the most poisonous, most divisive stuff I've heard come out of somewhere other than the KKK.
And how do we determine where the money goes? Does the slave-descended black man get a bonus while the non-slave-descended black man is out of luck? What about the Vietnamese boat person who arrived in the 70s? Do we tell him "Sorry. This isn't the Land of Opportunity where you worked yourself ragged in your donut shop to send your two daughters to college to study computer science and genetics. This is an Evil Empire that needs to be broken up and distributed to members of another minority who have managed to complain more loudly and more skillfully than you." What about all the white trash living in trailers in the South? I can imagine that a few of those folks might be descended from white sharecroppers who were exploited along with the slaves. Maybe they should jump on the band wagon. Is China going to sue the UK for poisoning its populous with opium? Are all the fat people in the United States now going to bring suit against farmers, food manufacturers, and restaurants for making them fat? Maybe I should file a lawsuit against the UK myself for impoverishing and persecuting my forebears, leaving them no option for survival than to cross an ocean into a wilderness and to toil and sweat and bleed and fight and die so that I could sit in my underwear and rant. Actually, I shouldn't be directing my ire at the English. After all, the English aren't really English, they're French. It's the damned Normans who invaded and subjugated the island. I'm sure the Roman Empire had a hand in somewhere. So now I need to sue the crap out of the French and the Italians because I'm not Bill Gates. It's always the damned French.
Finally, don't you think it's just a teensy bit ironic that teams of educated, successful black lawyers are filing these suits in the country that allowed them the opportunity to become educated, successful lawyers?
Pakeha