Note: I had a longer post prepared, but some dick stole the chair that sits in front of the computer on the fifth floor of the college library and my legs are killing me, so you'll have to settle for this.
Anyway, Nelson Mandela died, and as you might expect when a beloved international figure about whom very little in the negative can ever really be said, someone in South Carolina managed to cock that one up by saying or doing something negative in response. You may or may not be aware that we have a county by the name of Pickens, after the Revolutionary War general of the same name. That county has a sheriff whose actions last week (refusing to lower the flag in honor of Mandela, despite the executive order from "socialist Kenyan gay-marriage-arranging Obama" to do so). What's disturbing about this is not the nincompoop's reasoning ("Mandela was a great guy but hey, he wasn't an American") but the fact that in an online poll, a lot of people in the state agree with him.
Morons...I'm surrounded by morons.
First off: Nelson Mandela did more with his little pinkie finger to change the world for the better than many of us are likely to achieve in double the lifespan that he achieved (95 years old; police suspect foul play). Secondly, to say that lowering the flag for non-Americans is somehow not done is plain old stupid. We don't do it often, but in this case I think it's merited.
The sheriff, whose name I won't mention here because a.)I don't want to give him any more free publicity and b.) I've already forgotten it, is playing politics, appealing to the base (and I do mean "base") of his potential voters come re-election time. They'll remember this guy, for sure, and I'm sad to say they might re-elect his sorry ass because of it.
At any rate, I was moved to crank up "Waltz for Lumumba" over the weekend, off the Spencer Davis Group's greatest-hits CD. The SDG was the springboard for Steve Winwood, another in a long line of "white British guys who love blues music and emulate it in their vocal delivery," and he's one of the best ones. "Waltz" is an instrumental, however, and I'm guessing most people today don't know that Patrice Lumumba was the first democratically elected president of the Congo (and the first president of that nation to be assassinated, because the CIA didn't like his close ties to the Commies). Lumumba went down in 1961, if I recall correctly; between that time and Mandela's release in 1990, most of Africa was in the hands of dictators propped up by the CIA (as a bulwark against the Soviet menace) and brutal to their own people. Mandela kept South Africa from becoming a racial bloodbath by bringing people together. Whatever he did that led to his time in prison, he came out of it a much better man than anyone would've expected from a guy locked up behind bars for close to thirty years. That's enough of a legacy to shame any Podunk asswipe hillbilly sheriff, even if he is from my state.
People will forget this dipshit sheriff in time, Nelson Mandela will never be forgotten. Tell me which one you'd want to honor with a flag at half-mast.
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