It’s Been a Rough Day for Undercover Bigots

 

There was a time when even a person as famous as Paula Deen could be sued by an employee, reach a settlement/hush money agreement and carry on with nothing lost but a hefty pile of cash.

To quote some grammatically challenged person from the past, “Them days is gone forever.”

The news of the last couple of weeks, with the government seeming to care who I talk to on the phone – which, by the way, is a colossal waste of time, since I speak on the phone about once a week, if that – and an article I saw somewhere that asserted the government can spy on us in every room in our house if they are so inclined, is starting to make me feel as if the world is literally closing in on me.

The illusion of privacy is dying hard, but it is dying.  All one has to do is pay attention to the way personal online viewing habits are monitored in order to target you, specifically, with their relentless marketing.  If you are stupid enough to try to get away with killing your spouse or robbing a bank, if the surveillance cameras don’t nail you, the pings on your cell phone will. 

GPS has been repeatedly and variously marketed to consumers as a convenience for finding their ways to anywhere they want or need to go.  The truth is that GPS is a tracking device that follows your electronic device with the GPS feature activated everywhere you carry it.  I no longer have to wonder where on the globe my jet-setting son happens to be on any given day.  All I have to do a read his latest Facebook message – FB lets me know he is somewhere near Oakland or New York City.

Paula Deen has been literally taken down by today’s technology.  There are millions of people all over the world who now know that underneath all that smarmy, chicken-fried charm of her is a person nobody would recognize. 

Paula Deen insists that she and her family only used the n-word if it was not in a mean way.  Say what?  On what planet is there an acceptable context for the use of this word by Paula Deen?  

Here are just two quotes from the deposition that blow the lid off any pretense of her being misunderstood:

“The whole entire waiter staff was middle-aged black men, and they had on beautiful white jackets with a black bow tie. I mean, it was really impressive. That restaurant represented a certain era in America… after the Civil War, during the Civil War, before the Civil War… It was not only black men, it was black women… I would say they were slaves.”

About the alleged racist jokes, Paula explained:

“It’s just what they are — they’re jokes…most jokes are about Jewish people, rednecks, black folks…I can’t determine what offends another person.”

Another allegation against Deen’s brother, Bubba Hiers, who runs one of the family’s restaurants in Savannah, GA, is that Hiers required black employees and white employees to use separate bathrooms. 

I hear there are people who think Paula’s firing from The Food Network this afternoon seems to be an overreaction.  After all, they are saying, Deen is 66 years old and is a product of a different time.  Aren’t we all?  I would love to be a fly on the wall when Paula Deen has to explain herself to her pal Oprah.  I’m pretty sure Oprah would have expected Paula to learn a few things about right and wrong since 1946.  I know I do.

I had a daydream earlier about Malcolm X sitting wherever he ended up in the afterlife looking upon the events of today with a pretty undeniable smirk on his face.  I heard chickens clucking in the background. 

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