Riff Raff: Observations, curly mustaches and lost causes

Tried to get this essay approved through Russian back channels. Turns out, that’s not a good idea. But the essay contains good words, some of the best words. Some of the best words I know, at least. When’s the medical marijuana become available?

• It’s nice you are up early trying to stay healthy. But if you’re jogging on the road before sunrise in dark colors, am not sure how healthy you’ll look with your tibia as a hood ornament and the rest of you tweezered out of my radiator.

• Walmart U.S. store receipts want to know about your visit. The incentive to testify is free gift cards. With several hundred million folks shopping Walmart each week, my odds of winning a gift card are somewhere near my odds of being adopted by a Walton. The recent visit was nice, however. The retired guy at the table soliciting Children’s Hospital donations has a Rollie Fingers’ mustache. Took him about three months to grow it out to where he could wax it up with the curly flair on each end. He was in the Navy. Retired as a cook on a submarine. He misses it.

“I’d go back tomorrow if they’d let me. I loved being in the Navy,” he said.

An elderly couple was arguing over fruit. Those 3 for 98-cents chunky chocolate chip cookies y’all pimp near the healthy stuff were calling my name, but I resisted. Several folks were picking through your beef and poultry selection, probably prepping for a Memorial Day grill. But your beef is not the best quality and a little overpriced. Best money on beef is still with a local butcher shop or at Harps.

Ran into an old friend who now lives in Florida. We got to catchin’ up and noticed we were bottle necking one of the self-checkout lanes. Sorry about that, Mr. Foran.

Facebook is where you can find me if there is any interest in adoption.

• With each one of these Memorial Day and Veterans Day events I become less supportive of a government that sends us to war based on perceived national security interests. Big money and big religion can go take a long walk. The defense industry, also. We all should be tired of being sucked in by the blind patriotism and manufactured fear borne of flag-wrapped fiction.

• He’s boss in the Big Easy, but it’s been anything but easy for New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu. The city removed four confederate monuments from its public areas, with the last being the iconic statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee high atop a 60-foot pedestal in the city’s popular Tivoli Circle.

Backlash has been nasty. Members of the Fort Smith School Board can relate. As, to some extent, might Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and others who supported the successful separation of holidays for Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert E. Lee.

Mayor Landrieu gave a speech just a few hours before the Lee statue was removed from Tivoli Circle. He didn’t come to mollify, equivocate or go pansy ass and seek some political middle ground. He came out with a little edge, a dash of anger; as if put out for having to justify the removal of tributes to those who fought to defend slavery.

“The historic record is clear: the Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and P.G.T. Beauregard statues were not erected just to honor these men, but as part of the movement which became known as The Cult of the Lost Cause. This ‘cult’ had one goal — through monuments and through other means — to rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity,” the Mayor said.

Cult. Wrong side of humanity. Preach on, brother Landrieu.

“America was the place where nearly 4,000 of our fellow citizens were lynched, 540 alone in Louisiana; where the courts enshrined ‘separate but equal’; where Freedom riders coming to New Orleans were beaten to a bloody pulp. So when people say to me that the monuments in question are history, well what I just described is real history as well, and it is the searing truth,” Landreiu said.

“And it immediately begs the questions: why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives; the pain, the sacrifice, the shame … all of it happening on the soil of New Orleans.

“So for those self-appointed defenders of history and the monuments, they are eerily silent on what amounts to this historical malfeasance, a lie by omission.

“There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it. … As President George W. Bush said at the dedication ceremony for the National Museum of African American History & Culture, ‘A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them.’” (You, Kind Reader, can link here for the full speech.)

A correction is underway. Dying out daily is the generation sympathetic, even if subconsciously so, to confederate symbols of a “lost cause” and other emblems of white Judeo-Christian supremacy. A majority of Millennials and younger generations don’t play that game.

Mick and the boys were right. Time is on our side.