Mood:
hug meTopic: "Dead Honkey"
Frodo had watched every single one, and that is why he would not watch this one. Every time, Frodo would get so spitting angry at him that he would say things impolitic and venomous. Time after time he would start a speech by saying "Mah fellow Amurricans, I cum before yew with a heavy hart. . .," and Frodo just couldn't stand to hear that ever again. It would be followed by the numbers. 247, 299, 206, 311. . .the number of American troops who had died that week. That is why Frodo drank beer, rather than watch the television, on the night that Lyndon Johnson announced he would not seek re-election.
Eugene McCarthy had openly challenged the President of the United States for the nomination of his own party, and he was winning the minds of America's heart. Frodo's candidate was Robert Kennedy who, not unlike everyone else, was on the sidelines and sanguine about a challenge to a sitting President of his own party. Eugene McCarthy had the intellectual courage to challenge and to fight for what was right. Lyndon Johnson withdrew rather than continue the struggle against McCarthy and his supporters. It was a challenge that Frodo knew McCarthy eventually would lose, but Frodo, for all the years that followed, always stopped to listen when Eugene McCarthy spoke. He would not say what someone wanted, he would say what he felt.
Eugene McCarthy said he could not bear to watch the second inauguration of George W. Bush because he considered him a moron.
Richard Pryor sat across from Chevy Chase and they portrayed an employment interviewer and a job applicant. The questions were bureaucratic, and the responses appropriate. That is, until the question came to race, and then the staccato epithets of "Spade," "White Trash," "Jungle Bunny," and "Honkey" were peppered back-and-forth by these premier comedic actors. Frodo was hysterical with laughter, and he started a television affair with the outrageous nuance of hilarity and social discourse. Perhaps the best way to get along together was to laugh at each other openly? Frodo promised himself that he would be like Richard Pryor and to always say to anyone what he would say to everyone else.
White people in Atlanta do not have the courage to tell their black neighbors what they call MARTA (Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority) when there are no black people around. Frodo would tell anyone that they say "Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta." Frodo wonders what would happen if Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney asked Governor Sonny Perdue what MARTA really meant?
Eugene McCarthy and Richard Pryor died on the same day. Frodo cannot think of anyone else who symbolized the iconclastic era of the 1960's as did these last two survivors of the decade with purpose. With their passing the "sexy sixties" become history, not memory.
Frodo needs a hug.
Posted by loveysdaddyga
at 10:01 PM EST
Updated: Sunday, December 11, 2005 10:06 PM EST
