Obama got elected by a landslide a few weeks ago, and a vocal minority in the southern states rushed to show just how stupid, ignorant and backward they are by signing a multitude of petitions asking the newly elected President to allow their states to secede.
See examples here on my other blog:
Snark Amendment: To Secede or Merely Succeed, that is the Question
Snark Amendment: Secession Wars!
I would compare this to a political version of the Jackass movies or the Darwin Awards. We stand watching with our mouths open while some poor fool attaches a rocket to his car like Wile E. Coyote before flying off into the side of a cliff. You can't talk these people out of their stupid ways. These folks are a few tea bags shy of a load. They are rowing with both oars out of the water. They are just not all there. There is no there there.
For anyone reading this who is unacquainted with the real South as it really is, and not the parody on TV, you have no idea how embarrassing such petitions are to the vast majority of people in the red states, even those who voted overwhelmingly for Mitt Romney. Let me assure you, even most Republicans do not want to re-fight the Civil War, thank you very much. Frankly, most Southerners never wanted to fight it in the first place.
The Democrats trapped inside these red states merely do a collective facepalm and point out the cognitive dissonance of people who hypothetically have a brother on SSI, a sister on food stamps, an uncle who works for TVA, a parent on disability, and a Grandma who gets Medicaid for nursing home care . . . yet they are vowing to secede from the government who pays for all that. You've got millions of people in red states who drive the interstate highways, hunt and fish in National Forests, benefit from Obama tax cuts, benefit from Obamacare (or soon will), and never give a thought to where those things come from.
In begging to secede, they are figuratively cutting off their nose to spite their face in the name of . . . spite, or anger, or outrage that a black man has once again been legally elected by a majority of the citizens of the United States. Secession-minded people will swear up and down they are not racist because how dare anyone call them that since they know and work with black people, go to school together, and are even friends with some of them! (*sigh* - yes people really say that stuff)
But of course they don't like it that people of color have just as much right to be President as a white person - and that's the problem. They are stuck in the Jim Crow days, and hate it that Karl Rove couldn't steal the election for them. And it doesn't help that they are hopped up on Fox News and Rush Limbaugh talking points.
It's racism. There is no other explanation for the knee-jerk reaction of this secessionist crowd. You can call it "bad-sportsmanship" over the election if you are a really nice person and have on your rose-colored glasses, but that is the understatement of the year.
The idiots signing these petitions are not representative of their states and they are the last ones to care that they reinforce the uneducated racist stereotype of white people in the South. They don't even think about what they are doing or how it might seem to others. Like their heroes Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, they are simultaneously selfish political narcissists and intellectual cretins. Probably everyone they know feels the same way, so they have no empathy for another view, and no respect for Democrats. It's not about thinking - prejudice is an emotion to them. They learn it at the feet of their parents, or from their grandparents, or worse - their pastors and coaches and even teachers. It's like a genetic disease passed from generation to generation in some communities - and the main sympton is rank stupidity.
Let's call this the "Sound and the Fury" crowd to quote both Mississippi author William Faulkner and his inspiration, William Shakespeare.
Macbeth: To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Exactly - signifying nothing, because nothing is really going to happen. As soon as people on Twitter began making jokes about the secessionist petitions, and someone made a petition to Deport anyone asking to secede, they suddenly got all defensive. They didn't REALLY want to secede, but merely to send a "message" to Obama. What message? That they hate the President? Why? Didn't you accept Bill Clinton when he was elected? The only answer that makes sense is that Obama is black and doesn't fit their world view of what a "real" American President should look like.
No one understood the "Confederate" crowd clinging to the not-so-glorious past more than author Faulkner:
"The past is never dead, it's not even past."
But Faulkner also said:
"To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow."
It would be nice if they would think about that in Mississippi, or Texas, or Tennessee, or Alabama, etc., and if some of these idiots would think twice before rushing to the internet to show their ignorant racist side once again.
