Lost?

by Dick Mac

I feel lost.

If teabaggers and their leaders like Rand Paul get their way, we will roll-back the clocks to an earlier time in American commerce and culture.

I've been thinking about the teabagger notion that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which, for better or worse, spawned affirmative action) should apply only to the federal government and not to private industry.

What this means is that teabaggers think that only the Feds should be required to hire black people, and that private industry could remain all white (and Asian, of course).

They argue that this is not the case, that the marketplace will somehow magically eradicate racism; but, people who use their brains for more than analyzing television shows, and their knees for more than kneeling at the shrine of Reagan's genitalia, know that the marketplace is unable to control or regulate anything.

Teabaggers also believe in small government (whatever that is), which means that at the same time they think that American Blacks should only be protected in the workplace controlled by the Feds (that is, government employment), they are saying that the Federal government should be eliminated, effectively eliminating employment opportunities for Black Americans.

So, in this magic free-market world where racism is suddenly eradicated through the good-will and spiritual magnanimity of capitalism, where private industry is not required to employee anybody except Whites (and Asians), and the Federal government employs only elected officials and a military, where exactly are American Blacks supposed to earn a living?

The military?

Wow! Sounds like the draft-era practices of a racist military during the Vietnam War, where a greater percentage of American Blacks served on the front lines than did other Americans.

Shall all our elected officials be Black?

Let's take the Civil Rights Act to an absurd level (to match the absurdity of teabagging analyses) and say that all elected officials in the Federal government must be Black!

This way, every White district would need to ensure that one Black American lived there, so they'd have someone to elect. And it would be best if there were more than one Black American to run for public office, so each district would probably have to ensure that a handful of Black families lived in their districts.

But in Reagan's America we are eliminating the government, so I imagine we will reduce the number of seats in Congress and the Senate to say, 50 Representatives and 50 Senators. Because government is bad, and it should be small. So we will have one hundred jobs for Black Americans. Give each of them a staff of ten and we are up to eleven hundred Black Americans employed through the advances of the Civil Rights Act.

If the protections of the Civil Rights Act are not supposed to apply to private industry, and the government is not supposed to hire people, where will the rest of all the Black Americans work?

Why do teabaggers and Rand Paul hate America so much?