Parody of Paranoia

No way is any daughter of mine going to school to listen
to that dangerous Negro socialist president!

I'm inspired to share a little bit of brilliance I discovered today with you.

My children went off to school today with my blessing. I was excited that the President would be speaking to schoolchildren throughout the country.

I've been absorbed with some projects and fun things recently, so I hadn't realized just how controversial this simple act was becoming. Some friends' Facebook posts alerted me to the madness. I particularly liked this one by Mary C. Curtis at Politics Daily. She quotes a couple of sentences from Ronald Reagan's 1986 address to schoolchildren:

"We got inflation down, interest rates down, and our economy created over one and a half million new jobs just last year alone. The poor are now increasingly able to dig themselves out of poverty, and that's been good economic news."

What-ever.

Wheaton College Economics professor John Miller noted in a 2004 article on Ronald Reagan's Legacy:

Reagan's economic legacy endures. Government continues to turn its back on social spending for the poor in favor of ineffectual tax giveaways for the rich, at same time that it finds unlimited monies for military adventures. Lopsided economic growth showers benefits on stock investors while doing precious little for workers or-not an entirely separate group-the poor. And today's Depression-level inequality is not mitigated as much as it once was by the tax code.

I found a really interesting article entitled The Ghost of Ronald Reagan: How We Remember the Real Legacy of the Conservative Icon. Here are a few choice morsels:

Through the skillful use of imagery, code words and political action, the Reagan administrations--in both California when he was governor and then in Washington--managed to thwart and even reverse Black aspirations and goals in the United States and in Africa.
...
...political observers were noting the Obama's run to White House depended largely on the votes of the so-called Reagan Democrats. Those formerly reliable blue-collar Democratic voters, threatened by social change and Black gains, switched to Reagan in 1980 and continue to vote against their own economic and sociopolitical factors.
...
Conservatives have had such a monopoly on his image that few Americans today remember that while running for governor in California in 1966, Reagan promised to dismantle the Fair Housing Act, saying, "If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, he has a right to do so."
...
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Bishop Desmond Tutu characterized the Reagan legacy as "immoral, evil and totally un-Christian."

We all know that some of the parents who are freaking out are against Obama at least in part because they aren't comfortable with a black man as president. I'd suggest that a significant part of the fear people have about Obama's speech is that they worry he'll do what Reagan did - inspire young people to get involved in governance.

I certainly hope so.

But I promised you a little bit of brilliance. And my post title refers to a parody. Without further ado, here 'tis.

CNN aired a clip showing a Tammy Faye Baker-like conservative mother crying her eyes out over the prospect of the President speaking to her child and countless other innocents.



Then another woman did an awesome parody.





I especially love reading the comments. Some people don't get that it's a parody. After watching the original clip, I get that. The fearmongers and fearful verge on hysteria.

In the Facebook posting of this, one of my friends labeled it "Hysterically funny." Another friend commented soberly "we laugh these people off at our own peril."

Yup.