Y'all ever have one of those days when the more you hear about something, the madder it makes you?
So as if the Great State of Georgia doesn't have enough race-related P.R. problems, some feller apparently goes and starts him up an all-white basketball team. No blacks allowed. Everybody knows there the damn media's going to run with this: "Georgia based cracker hates the coloreds". So I started out being pissed off because racist people piss me off, and the perception that we're all Klansmen runnin' around in trucks and my Rebel Flag sticker on the back of the truck is some kind of bona fide proof of same does too.
Turns out the feller's from Atlanta, which is one of the most cosmopolitan, ethnically diverse parts of the entire country. That dog would hunt if it had been Conyers or Lawrenceville, perhaps. In fact, Atlanta's such a tolerant area that even the black community, which normally has serious and violent problems with gays in its midst, has, if the Lenox mall is anything to go by, a practical enclave of flamboyant black homosexuals. I ain't judging them, I'm just sayin'. You might get the occasional asshole, but half of Gwinnett County is Indian, and remember, Atlanta is where Dr. Martin Luther King was from. It would be news if someone was so openly assholish and racist up in here, but not for "typical Georgian racism" reasons. Atlanta's one of those places where if you're some kind of bigot, you keep your fool mouth shut. So this guy trying that in Atlanta made me even madder.
I mean, don't get me wrong, you've got ample reasons to believe the South is full of weirdos. That Maurice feller from South Carolina with Wal-Mart sayin' no to his barbecue sauce is a dyed-in-the-wool, outright racist and lunatic, says that the Confederate flag has to fly over the State Capitol because it's a pre-Christian holy symbol/battleaxe against Satan. Shame really. His barbeque is good and it makes crossin' over the border at Augusta that much more painful, but I digress.
So I finally watch an interview on the TV with this smug little man who's startin this up, and he goes and says that he wants to play a "pure basketball" without it being ruined by the outright athleticism of black men. In other words, white men can't jump, white men can't dunk, so they have to pass the ball and throw it from the floor. I'm a football fan and like hunting, so I'm not sure if I got this right, but seems to me like he managed to imply black people were some kind of primitive supermen who lacked finesse, and that white men are physical underachievers who need to connive and work on "strategy" to make up for their innate physical inability. In one fell swoop, he managed to insult every man in Georgia. Maw-Maw had to get me to stop shouting at the TV by that point.
Then he said somethin' that made me want to reach through the screen and slap the stupid out of him. With a little roguish twinkle in his eye, he answered the question as to whether this was a controversial move with "well, you (e.g. the media) are here, aren't you?" and what does he then go on to say when the cameras are rolling? What does he do with the media attention? "We're in negotiations to produce a reality series about this." In other words, the whole thing was manufactured in order to get interest in yet another pointless, useless, series, with a bunch of "underdog" white men trying to "bond" and overcome their racial handicaps to beat the all-black teams the producer envisages them going up against. I think he said somethin' like it being "glow-ball vs. bro-ball". Let me tell you, if I was down there on THAT basketball court, there'd be some yellow flags all over that court with one genuine display of unsportsmanlike conduct from yours truly.
I tell Maw-Maw I'm goin' out for more tobacco, and I need to cool my jets. Maw-maw's a good lady, she knows when I need to simmer down on my own. So I turn the radio on, and that Neil Boortz is discussin' the same damn thing. And then he says somethin' like "why not an all-white basketball league? After all, the blacks have the NBA." I almost went off the road stabbin' my finger at the off button on the radio.
I'm glad my blood pressure check ain't til two months from now.