By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

“My son was murdered.
He was murdered.
He was murdered.
He was murdered.
My son was murdered!”

– Wanda Johnson, mother of Oscar J. Grant III, shooting victim

I thought it was my Taser, not my gun
not my gun
not my gun
not my gun
I thought it was my Taser, not my gun!

– A confused rapid transit police officer

We’d have decided the same for a black officer
a black officer
a black officer
a black officer
We’d have decided the same for a black officer!

– A jury with no blacks

It was just a mistake, but we’ll pay
but we’ll pay
but we’ll pay
but we’ll pay
It was just a mistake, but we’ll pay!

– A public agency facing a wrongful death suit

Oakland mayor asked the people for calm in the streets
calm in the streets
calm in the streets
calm in the streets
Oakland mayor asked the people for calm in the streets!

– A black man who knows the outrage of police behaving stupidly

“You shot me!”
“You shot me!”
“You shot me!”
“You shot me!”
“You shot me!”

– Oscar J. Grant III

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

This piece is crossposted at The Progressive Post.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

During the 2008 presidential campaign, a dear former colleague railed at me in rather frothy email verbiage when I took a written poke at Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Although he eventually calmed enough to offer a sort of apology, I never heard from him again. If he’d just given me an opportunity to explain, I could have, well, I don’t know, explained — explained the humor to him. Ye gods, the thing was titled “You Can Put Lipstick on a Fib”! You’d think that would be a dead giveaway to take what follows with a grain of giggle. Jeez!

What can I say? We Gressitts are prone to humor; it’s a powerful coping mechanism — the darker the better. When Mother was still driving, she joked about keeping Father’s ashes in the trunk in case she needed extra traction to get up her hill in the winter. It took the sting off her sorrow. Years ago, when I joked with the ER doc suturing my battered face (I suggested a bribe of homemade shortbread in exchange for his working some magic to prevent scarring), he joked right back. The levity got me through the procedure without grabbing a scalpel and preventing my now-former husband’s dick from having any more fun with jane. Although I have to admit, after recovering from the assault, I found the doc’s response really depressing and I was pissed with both of us — and I never made him that damn shortbread. We need to train ER staff not to enable victimhood. Right after we train women to duck faster.

See what I mean? It is unrelenting.

Just the other day, a friendly reader questioned the sincerity of true feminists joking about breast cancer. She was gracious, and her comment made me wonder how many folks might have taken offense at the joke I had published. But if you’ve never been close to cancer, you might not understand how fabulous a death-defying tool laughter can be — even a wise-ass smirk can prove useful. And I find California senatorial candidate Carly Fiorina (the subject of the joke) and her politicking in the realm of breast cancer as worthy of a one-liner or two as is staving off the angst of alien-possessed boobs. A breast cancer survivor herself, Fiorina used the Susan G. Komen for the Cure fund-raising page to make a pitch for her campaign for U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer’s seat (watch the video):

Cancer strengthened my faith. Cancer strengthened my family. And I come through all of this battle, not only with it behind me, but with a renewed determination to make the most of my life. And for me, now, that means to try and make a difference for the people of California, in Washington, D.C. My doctors have given me a clean bill of health. They’re actually extremely excited that I’m running for the Senate. I feel great. I’m raring to go. And the good news is, after chemotherapy, Barbara Boxer isn’t very scary anymore.

How deliciously crass! My feminist friend’s response to Fiorina’s play of the breast cancer card? “Maybe Barbara Boxer could have an iffy mammogram.” Spoken like the funny breast cancer survivor she is.

Albeit only one tool, humor can help sustain us through the most atrocious assaults on our sensibilities; for example, Arizona’s continuing effort to incarcerate, forcibly repatriate or otherwise excoriate anyone who isn’t, well, you know — sshhhh — one of us white folk.

Leaders of the erstwhile Barry Goldwater, Sr. state are afraid that public schools are vulnerable to the ravages of ethnic solidarity among the dark hordes — why, those heathens could rise up and vote them right out of power! But traditional social studies curricula were cleverly crafted to induct our young ones into the still-pervasive doctrine of Manifest Destiny, to keep white folk on top, literally and figuratively. Hence, alternate curricula — any study of perspectives other than that of the white landed gentry — threaten the status quo and, consequently, comprise what Arizona’s good old boys and gals fear: “courses or classes that either promote the overthrow of the United States government or promote resentment toward a race or class of people.” Bear in mind that Arizona’s legislators had to strike “Caucasian” from an earlier version of that statement — at least in their minds, if not in print. That’s ethnic cleansing Arizona style.

And Arizona’s recent purge of teachers with heavy accents or bad English grammar strikes another blow, but to an unexpected target — the South. Those damn Yankees are at it again! This prejudicial policy renders teaching positions in Arizona unattainable to any progeny of my paternal ancestral home, Gressitt, Virginia. In this kudzu-creeping hamlet of clamdiggers, crabbers and valiant volunteer firefighters, one might hear the likes of, “Aah juss mahoov mah deeah suhee mama eeanduh reeuhl naahs dubahwahd.” For those unschooled in Virginia Backwaterese, that translates as “I just moved my dear, sweet mama into a real nice doublewide.”

After a good laugh, I’ll shed a tear for Arizona’s lost opportunity for cultural exchange with the unabashed South and hope that the state’s educators are devious enough to do some fast “Find and Replace” in their curricular materials, to pacify the ethnic-phobic.

Thank the goddess there is enough idiocy out there to keep us endlessly entertained, which is a nice segue to Sarah Palin.

She’s ever rich fodder for comedy, but I’m not sure who is more laughable — Palin, for assuming the title of feminist at an anti-abortion gathering, or the feminists who jumped through various and contorted rationales to lend it to her. God forbid they should deny the nomenclature to a powerful woman and thereby risk their own standing in the Sisterhood! What they fail to recognize is that power, position and number of Facebook fans do not a true feminist make, any more than poofy sleeves, a calico Bible cover and “God Hates Fags” signs stacked in the garage make you a true Christian.

Now, what Palin doesn’t understand is that no feminist would advocate putting women’s reproductive decision-making in anyone’s hands but the women’s. We’re good with our hands; we don’t need any help down there from no guhmint.

Yeayah. … That doesn’t really translate.

Love,
K-B

Want to learn more about immigration?

Read “The Devil’s Highway” by Luis Alberto Urrea (2004, Little Brown and Company) and watch “Lone Star,” written and directed by John Sayles and featuring Chris Cooper and Elizabeth Peña.

— My thanks to Professor Silverio Haro, CalState San Marcos and Palomar College, for the great recommendations.

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

The book was a struggle, but I felt duty bound to stay put in my yard chair and honor the author’s effort to finish the thing. Consequently, even a trail of ants, Fallbrook’s ever-present organic waste abatement crews, distracted me from the chore of reading. I watched the good little refuse engineers tidily toting to their nest the remnants of a mourning dove egg, probably dropped from its cedar nest by a murderous Blue Jay. I’d heard a ruckus the day before and ducked inside to avoid its calamitous end. But damn if fate didn’t catch up with me! At least the ants were swift and effective. Perhaps too effective.

I remembered the gift my father sent to my kiddo when she was small enough to still handle insects as though they were playthings. It had been a surprise, a special grandfatherly treat. And, according to the accompanying literature, we all — yes, children and adults alike — were in for hours of entomological fun as we played audience to the life’s work of the inhabitants of Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm.

Actually, said inhabitants of the green petrochemical-based farm were shipped separately, which meant a wait for all that fun we knew was coming our way. In the meantime, we filled the bottom couple inches of the farm with the lily-white synthetic sand provided, and eagerly anticipated the ants’ Herculean feats, their mind-bending commitment to earthmoving, their fastidious exercise of home economics — all the requisite behaviors of a proper ant.

The estimated day of arrival drew near, and we tacked the ant poster that came with the farm to my daughter’s wall. Together, we reviewed Milton’s ageless discourse on the wondrous world of ants. With a couple of honored bugologists in the family, I thought this might prove a prophetic science experience for the kid, soon to graduate from daycare to real school.

At long last, our ants arrived — as expected, only soldier-workers of ambiguous gender. Queens were prohibited from travel. In we poured our new housemates to their escape-proof quarters, while I considered the years of effort I’d previously expended to keep the little bastards out of our home. Nonetheless, gave them a welcoming honey-water spritz and set them in a place of honor at the dining room table.

Thankfully, Uncle Milton had adequately forewarned us, so we were not surprised when a few ants died the first day or two. This was to be expected. What was a bit disconcerting was the ants’ method of disposing of their dead: They broke down their brethren and, piece by piece, added their teeny black body parts to the white synthetic hills. And, to my maternal dismay, the ants continued dropping like, well, flies. Every day, we awoke to a grislier scene of death and dismemberment as the lily mounds became speckled with the black grains of dissected ant bodies.

In fear for my daughter’s psyche, and not a little grossed out, I poured through Uncle Milton’s brochure, a desperate review in search of advice I might have missed, critical guidance for keeping ants alive and well, but to no avail. The ants continued their unthinking hill building and their dying, only to be recycled as pepper to the sand’s salt by their surviving peers.

As the ant population rapidly dwindled and the hills darkened, I wondered about the significance of the ants’ unnatural existence on my table. Even when confronted with increasing mortality, the soldiers just plodded along, following the mandate of their biology — until the sad day when but one ant remained alive.

A lousy way to start the morning, I groped my way to the kitchen for day-old coffee and the eye dropper of honey-water, and returned to find the sole survivor atop the tallest hill peering skyward. I was grateful that the poor thing was too brainless to experience the bitter isolation of such utter aloneness, too rudimentary to beseech some great ant god in the artificial green sky to end this brutal abandonment. Unwilling to expose my daughter to such angst, I shattered the plastic and dumped the last ant outside in the garbage — to eat himself to a happy end.

I was certain then, as I am now, that we are not intended to keep ant farms on our dining room tables. Any more than we are intended to live in petrochemical plastic and perpetuate our soulless behaviors into our own extinction — our reckless Wall Street finanigans, our natural resource guzzling, our political demolition derbies, our hate-mortared border walls.

But, hey, it was just a bunch of ants, you might say? Yes, and if we don’t do any better than Uncle Milton’s ants, the species in my yard is likely to outlast us all, tidily toting our remnants back to their nests.

Love,
K-B

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

There’s a big old brouhaha about Arizona’s new anti-illegal alien law, effortlessly passed by the state legislature and signed into law by Governor Jan Brewer on 23 April. The law relies on police officer discretion to determine if there is reasonable suspicion (this exists in the ethereal zone between a hunch and the cold, hard circumstances of probable cause) that someone stopped for, say, a traffic violation or for loitering in low-end attire in a high-end neighborhood, is in the United States illegally. (There are some additional provisions that, all told, make the law some rather fascist reading.) Critics say such street-level discretion inevitably leads to racial profiling, something we abhor in this great nation of ours — unless it’s the other guy being profiled, the guy whose looks we don’t like.

Along with other Constitution-loving patriots, I must take issue with Senate Bill 1070, and having various family members who’ve dabbling with undocumented immigrant status, starting back in the Seventeenth Century and continuing into the not too distant Twentieth, is a darn good motivator. Given that heritage, my kiddo and I figured the only sane response to Arizona’s los jefés locos (that’s illegal-alien Spanish for “xenophobic crazies in charge of Arizona”) is to go for the illegal-alien look and head to the Grand Canyon State so we can be stopped by the local gendarmes (that’s illegal-alien French for “police”) and get arrested for failure to carry legal documentation of our status — “Heil, Ausländer! Zeigen Sie mir Ihre Papiere, du Juden!” (that’s illegal-alien Nazi for “Yo, aliens! Show me your papers, you Jews!”). Then we can make a big old stink about the racist law that will lead to its being overturned, and we can shuffle home to sunny Southern California to watch our favorite novellas.

So, we figured, we just have to look like aliens, which shouldn’t be too difficult for us. We’re used to looking different, what with Katie’s genetic olio and the dominant sub-culture in Fallbrook, where my liberal lapel pins serve as bull’s-eyes for right-wingers. And, upon exploring various closets and drawers, we came up with a pretty good option: a very nice, very simple illegal-alien French look — beret and faux fishing shirt (“faux,” that’s also one of those illegal-alien words). Katie modeled the look for us, and it seemed a tidy little snapshot of an alien.

Hmmm, but maybe too tidy? Too pretty? Too appealing to members of the white supremacy? And, although our fearless leaders felt compelled in a moment of pique to rename their fries, Americans really like French stuff — their fashions, their food and wine, their kisses — we even co-opted their Eiffel Tower for Las Vegas! So, nope, we decided we can’t rely on a French facade to get us stopped and tossed in the hoosegow (yet another illegal-alien word, from the Spanish juzgado, court).

Instead, we thought, a more practical, less sexy approach might be more likely to produce the arrest we’re after — which led us to Canadians! They’re much easier — all we need is earflaps and a six-pack of Moosehead, eh?

But rats! We realized we could be too easily mistaken for someone from Washington, Minnesota, upstate New York, any of the northern states. And even though they’re just not quite as cool as Americans, we still like the Canadians. So, no, this will never do. Double rats!

We were getting a little frustrated, and we did briefly consider an ET mask, but we really didn’t want to make a mockery of our campaign to bring down what amounts to a Down With Brown People Law, oh no, no, no. But wait! Down With Brown? Down with Brown!

In a flash of inspiration, we got it: Surely there is no better way to demand the attention of Arizona’s law enforcement officers seeking illegal aliens than to show up in brown face — brown face! — it’s perfect! ¡Perfecto! Parfait! Perfekt! Eh?

Yep, brown skin, sullen glare, gang sign — definitely illegal-alien material. We’d stumbled on the perfectly malevolent mask of the bandido, the savage Mexican criminal hell-bent on sucking up our social services and spewing out babies into constitutionally protected citizenship (unless Rep. Duncan D. Hunter, CD-52, successfully “clarifies” the Fourteenth Amendment and sends the U.S.-born offspring of illegal aliens packing with their mamis and papis).

In the meantime, it’s off to Arizona we go, and we encourage all brown-loving people to join us. We can caravan, do on-the-road civil disobedience training, print leaflets in the back of a psychedelic van and get high on silkscreen cleaner fluid, sing Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie, and do a little strategic planning for the subsequent round of protests, when Arizona spins its next bit of xenophobia — legislation to ban the burqa. At least that look will be a lot easier to emulate.

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

A man with the body of a boy peddles up the pitted road. His wheels send small puffs of hopeful dust up to God and crush harvester ants that do not recognize the border between safety and peril.

He leans his rusted bike against the fence and rattles the gate with the tentative gesture of one who would ask for something. A woman comes out, just as tentatively.

“Please, lady, work for me?” he implores with head bowed, braced to sustain the blow of another no.

Awash in conflicting monolingual ignorance, basic questions and answers are elusive; subtleties seem impossible. The woman wonders: How did you come to be here; do you understand I have a child and a mortgage and hence no piles of money laying about; but do you camp in a barranca, under an oleander hedgerow, it’s toxic leaves for your pillow; do you endure usurious fees for sending meager earnings home to family; do you suffer here, yet remain?

“OK, Señor, trabajo para usted.” Giving him work is easier than not, easier in many ways.

She points to the neglected fruit trees, the tools. He understands the task. And she flees inside to avoid his simple poverty, her unsettling discomfort. But he soon follows her with a quiet knock on the door.

“Perdone, please, lady, sandwich for me?”

She puts out food and cash and flees even further — to spend four times the man’s pay on cheeses, meats, on produce marked up for the honor of being out of season, harvested by his compatriots on distant lands.

When she returns from the market, he is gone, his dishes stacked neatly, the napkin folded, and much more work completed than requested.

Embarrassed by her suspicions, she resists checking the jewelry box and instead puts away her bounty and forgets about the man.

Until another day.

He returns to rattle the gate and ask again for work. She points again to the trees, the tools, and goes in to cook for him while he toils.

“Señor,” she comes back out, “food — comida.”

“¿Es para mí?” He is surprised; he had not asked to be fed this day.

He looks into her eyes for the first, fleeting time, revealing his dark brown sadness and one opalescent orb that does not see the physical world around him. “Gracias,” he says. “Dios te bendiga.”

She wants to hug him, but the line between them is formidable. Instead, she touches his gnarled hand and carries his blessing inside, and she ponders what it is about him that frightens people into hate. Do we imagine this man with the body of a boy and an eye that cannot ogle our opulence becomes, in greater numbers, a ravenous beast, greedily consuming our rich resources, stealing our comforts, rending from us what is manifestly ours?

And what if he did not migrate across the border, if others did not follow him, even then, could we possibly believe our schools would suddenly be adequately funded; our healthcare system would tend to all our ills; our emergency rooms would no longer bear the brunt of ailing, child-bearing indigents; our jails would become under-populated; our social services would enjoy a surplus of unclaimed resources; the graffiti, the roadside litter, the illicit drugs, the sins ascribed to the unwanted would all be swept up and away in a wave of homogeneous consideration?

No, she imagines, in the immigrant’s absence, people still would complain about misspent funds, about inequity in the allocation of the nation’s resources, about things and people and motivations we don’t understand. Still we would bellow our fear, our frustration, our prejudice, drowning out his soft supplications for labor and a sandwich.

The man comes to the woman’s gate to work and to eat — and to hope — the same reason we all rattle the gate.

Love,
K-B

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Photograph of migrant worker camp, 1939, courtesy of Library of Congress.)

A Fireside Chats excerpt by Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Benny Cantun hauled the Weber barbecue grill out of his pickup and set it in the empty parking space between the truck and his cargo van. While he did his macho duty, Aurelia took the younger children into Merry Market to use the toilet. If one had to go, she took them all. She said it was like a contagious disease, which always made Benny chuckle. So he laughed as he built the makeshift hearth of the temporary home they and a good number of other wildfire evacuees were creating in the market’s parking lot.

“My Aurelia, she is a good woman,” Benny murmured. He paused from his chores to remove his palm leaf hat and wipe his brow, and he took another moment to watch the growing community of those who also refused to leave town or had no place else to go, nestling in as the wildfire’s winds swirled ash across the graying asphalt. He put a fire starter on the grill, stacked a pyramid of charcoal on top and thought of his young primo, his cousin Jesus, just arrived from Teotihuacán and stubbornly camping in the barranca near the recycling center, when he could have been staying at their ranch with them.

“Where will he go now, with the fire? Foolish kid, too much pride,” Benny said to no one in particular, because no one was close enough to hear him, not that Benny was in need of an audience. In fact, even when his family was around him, he suspected his words sounded puny compared to Aurelia’s. When it came to his wife, she might as well be La Virgen de Guadalupe herself. She ruled the family, as his mother had hers. And he knew it was best, just as he knew it was his job to rail against it. The only thing Aurelia really needed him for anymore was to capture her rage when it escaped her. “Ah, bueno, as it should be. … I hope that boy joins us here — if he receives the message that our destination is this parking lot that wishes it was a campground.”

“Papi! Who are you talking to?” Benny’s oldest girl, Graciela, the one most like his Aurelia, called from inside the van.

“Nobody, nobody.”

“I bet you’re talking to yourself again, Papi, sí?” Graciela looked out the side door and twirled her finger by her temple.

“A little respect, por favor, Nena!” And they laughed together, knowing he would always talk to himself and she would always kid him about it, teasing being their common expression of love.

Benny pulled a match from the band of his hat and started the fire, noting the contradiction and sending a quick prayer to La Virgen.

“Maybe the boy won’t show; maybe he’s afraid to be seen by all the uniforms in town. La Migra, immigration, though, aren’t among them, but he won’t know that if he doesn’t pull his silly head out of that ditch. I guess we’ll find out as the night progresses.” He fanned the fire a moment with his hat, then meandered to the van to check on Graciela’s efforts to convert it into a comfortable bed for them all.

Benny admired the movements of his girl, so like her beautiful mother. She had finished high school while working her way up to checker at the market, and now she was taking her first classes at Palomar College — while she helped with the younger children and paid for half of her own education. Benny knew it was all Aurelia’s doing, but he couldn’t resist the glow of pride when he saw the girls at church who had not fared as well, coming to his youth group with swelling bellies and no papis to honor them, their babies or God. He looked into the van. “You have your Mami’s fine looks, Nena, but you did not inherit my mouth. You’ll need a lot of hot air to make those mattresses soft for us all.”

“Okay, Papi, you can blow them up with all your hot air if you want, but they come with a pump.”

“Ah, sí, sí, sí. You inherited your Mami’s smart cabeza, too. You’re a good girl, Graciela.” Benny tossed up a prayer of thanks that she was wise enough to grace Aurelia and him with sufficient ignorance to keep their hearts at ease. As best as he could tell, she put herself at little risk, swatting away the caballeros who would lead her from her path.

“Thanks, Papi.” Graciela silently re-affirmed her belief it was better not to share everything with her parents. “You’re not so bad for an old burro, but get out of my way so I can finish.”

They laughed again as Graciela pumped air mattresses and Benny turned to the cab of his truck and pulled an old portable radio from behind the passenger seat. It had only two working settings: Benny’s favorite music station and KGAP, which Benny usually avoided, but he thought tonight might be a little different. News littered with religiosidad was better than no news. He put the radio on the tailgate, turned it on to his music, and stared at the smoking charcoal. “Burn, you rotten bandits.” He poked at the briquettes, a compulsion he shared with the men of his family — it didn’t matter that their poking invariably postponed the magic moment when the coals accepted their destiny.

He hummed to the radio’s Ranchera music, contemplating the endless line of baptisms and quinceaños — much more spirited than the gringos’ cotillions — and family weddings that reached back before his conscious memory and, he well knew, would continue on far beyond the days his bones would fertilize the trees that now fed his family. He smiled as he wiped the perspiration from the back of his neck, its scars and creases, a map of his thirty years working his way through Fallbrook’s avocado groves to now owning four and managing many others.

“Most days, life is good in Fallbrook. Gracias a Dios.”

A rusty, rattling RV pulled alongside Benny’s van and stopped with a chorus of squeaks and groans and rattles, drowning out a taunt from Graciela for talking to himself again. A slim woman in a paint-smudged shirt slipped down from the driver’s seat, walked toward the market and met Benny’s glance. He looked away, but she smiled and said, “Ah, Monjaras, one of my favorite singers.” …

… Read more.

(Photo by Ross Orr via a Creative Commons License.)

Writers

Want to submit your work to Excuse Me, I’m Writing for the sheer joy of having an audience? Email your original fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry — 2,500 words maximum — in an MS Word document or in RTF to kb@kbgressitt.com. If we publish your work, you keep all rights, including bragging.

From Fallbrook’s Writers Read

The dirtiest poem is the poem you know you need to write but don’t. … And once it’s written, it won’t be dirty anymore.    —Brandon Cesmat, featured author

Over the next few days, I committed some accidental murders.    —youthful fiction

Desperately seeking more translation of the Village News

[O]ur elementary school district in Fallbrook flaunts the whole [bilingual] idea by putting up their signs in front of the schools in Spanish. We want them to speak English! The signage this month says “Augusto,” not “August!” Shame on you.      —Gloria Seelye

Area residents can celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month at Fallbrook Library September 11 from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. … They will enjoy a mariachi concert, light snacks of pan dulce and aguas frescas.                      —article flaunting bilingualism

Art Center unveils new restroom with gallery        —headline

Read more Fallbrookisms…

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

That socialist, Marxist, communist, illegal-alien President Barack Obama gave a speech to the pure and vulnerable innocents of our nation Tuesday.

Now, put your head on your knees and take slow, deep breaths. It is really important that you are able to read on. …

This liberal invader broke and entered the sanctity of our dear ones’ apolitical and parents’-rights-respecting K-through-12 classrooms via television to misspend our tax dollars on spreading his socialist ideology to our impressionable babes.

This is a bad thing, a bad, bad thing. I know this because all the experts on Obama’s true despicable character say it is so. But just to make sure, I reviewed his speech and oh dear sweet Baby Jesus! It is a thing of evil — cosmic, pernicious evil! And to help out those of you who don’t understand just how malevolent the Antichrist Obama is, I’ve taken the liberty of extracting the essence of his speech and analyzing it for you.

Beware, though, what follows is not for the young, the weak hearted, those whose faith is infirm. In fact, you might want to say a prayer to God right now — drop to your knees and ask God to just lay down His protective filter between the Obamanable words and your blessed eyes, lest the Evil One insinuate his sinister propaganda into your God-loving heart. Then fetch your Holy Bible and hold it tightly while you read. Or maybe balance it on your head?

And just one more thing before we begin: I want to ask that you join me in thanking God’s great warriors who risk their souls for us, day in and day out, against the liberal hordes, who shine God’s understanding and insightful light on the messages that the Obama Beast would have us believe are only words of wise encouragement, when they are, in fact, a sign of Hitler’s struggle reborn. Yes, God, please heap Your blessings upon our heroic defenders. Among them, the following:

Brannon Howse, of Worldview Times

La Mesa-Spring Valley, California, School Board Trustee Rick Winett

Jim Greer, chairman of the Florida Republican Party

VisionRevisted.com’s Mel Sanger

David S. Turndick at ResistNet.com

Oklahoma State Senator Steve Russell

The good folks at Today’s Obamanation

The anonymous author of the well-researched Christian Coalition blog post

And there are countless others — God knows who these saints are. Our prayers and blessings are with them all. Say amen!

Now, let me tell you, the Chairman Mao-bama reveals his beastly underbelly not more than three paragraphs into his speech, when he blatantly acknowledges his foreign education in a godless country:

When I was young, my family lived overseas. I lived in Indonesia for a few years. And my mother, she didn’t have the money to send me where all the American kids went to school.

Dear God, protect us from the mere imagining of what despicable anti-American filth filled the young boy’s heart and soul, turning him into the Arab terrorist-lover he is today. We don’t have to read the particulars; it’s enough that we know it is so — and it only gets worse from here. The white man-hating racist tries to usurp our authority over our precious offspring:

I’ve talked about your parents’ responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and you get your homework done, and don’t spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with the Xbox.

Right there, now that’s a direct assault on our constitutional right to parent our God-given children as we see fit. We don’t need any foreign-born globalist to tell us how our natural-born kids should be spending their time. And Gamepraise.com has plenty of Bible-teaching games for Xbox, anyway. But we’ll need more than the Bible to vanquish the insidious clutches of his evildoer smut. He actually tries to urge our young ones into the radical lifestyle of the leftwing media liars and liberal elite:

Maybe you could be a great writer — maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper…

Yes, the Obamanation’s intentions are as clear as Christ’s suffering for us on the cross: He wants to indoctrinate our children into one world order of think-alike, anti-morality, God-hating, homo-loving, humanist soldiers for Satan:

You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical-thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.

And to top it off, he wants our own children to become part of his healthcare reform death squads for seniors:

We need every single one of you to develop your talents and your skills and your intellect so you can help us old folks solve our most difficult problems.

Oh, yes, we know what problem he’s spewing about, with his evil bile. It’s that little problem of the true patriots who are in his way, giving their lives to fight against the one world order he and the Devil’s imps are devising with all the Jews and the Muslims and the atheists and the pinko revolutionaries and the demon technocrats who steal our personal information every time we swipe a credit card or use an ATM. The Obaminator wants our own children to overthrow us:

The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best. It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and they founded this nation. Young people. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google and Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.

And if this doesn’t convince you, just take a look at his conclusion:

Thank you very much, everybody. God bless you. God bless America. Thank you.

I pray to God you just play the audio of this final sentence backward — it’s not what you think. He’s actually chanting, “God is dead, 666, God is dead, 666, God is dead, 666!”

So beware, true believer, the end times are near — see for yourself!

Love,
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

20 August 2009

From Café des Artistes

An insult attributed to John Bright: He is a self-made man and worships his creator.
Michael: That sounds like one of our regulars.

Customer 1: Hey, I saved this letter to the editor for you. It’ll make you angry.
Customer 2: Thanks? … Hmmm. … He writes, ”I don’t think for a minute that our law-abiding, tax-paying, home-owning population is responsible for the trash on the roads, shopping carts left all over our community, yard sales along Main Street or laundry drying on fences along Fallbrook Street. … I am not a bigot, but…” I guess he doesn’t know what that means.

Phone banking for healthcare insurance reform

Volunteer: Are you familiar with President Obama’s three core principles for reforming healthcare?
Fallbrook voter: What’s a core principle?

Read more Fallbrookisms…

28 July 2009

United States Senate
Washington, D.C.

Dear white guys in wingtips,

If you had to appear in court and were given the opportunity to select your judge, I wonder how many of you would prefer the white guy in wingtips to the wise Latina judge with the richness of her experience.

Respectfully,
K-B

29 July 2009

English Department
Palomar College

Dear instructors who responded to my query about online writing classes with implications that I might fail to do my work, turn it in late or allow someone else to do it for me,

You are presumptuous, rude and, well, kind of sucky, and I am too old for this stuff. I surely hope this is not how you normally communicate with your students, a population I’ll not be joining.

By the way, your website content needs a little editing.

Collegially,
K-B

30 July 2009

Dear Tony, Sandra, Charlie, Martha and Percy; Dear Milt, Dionne, Warren, John, Patricia, Zo and Thelma; Dear Bonnie, George, Terry, Cliff and Mohammed; and Dear sweet girl who played with me at Lutherville Elementary when I was new and shy, and whose cornrows I craved when my thin, blond hair stuck to my pasty forehead,

I am writing to apologize for the many white folks who still don’t get it.

In our cushy little lives, insulated by the lily color of our skin, we just don’t get that prejudice prevails.

Oh, sure, the majority of us proudly extolled our enlightenment when we elected our first African American president — even some of us who didn’t vote for him — because it validated our belief in our moral superiority, our proud capacity for acknowledging a person’s abilities and potential regardless of race. And it was indeed a stellar moment for our nation.

But when it comes right down to it, when it comes down to the black-man-fumbling-at-the-front-door test — or the black-man-fuming-at-the-cop test — the election results mean squat. And for that I apologize.

White folks just don’t get that our historic willingness to wholeheartedly embrace the enslavement of a human race as an economic necessity prevails today, albeit in other forms, as so many of us wholeheartedly embrace the assumption that an angry black man is bad and scary — and even that a happy black man on a dark street is bad and really scary.

So, when President Barack Obama said the police behaved stupidly, some folks, but not enough, heard the sentiment of a person who has had experiences that lead him to empathize with a black man unfairly arrested.

And when Fox News’ Glenn Beck reacted, saying the president is a racist, some folks, but not enough, heard the sentiment of a person who has not had experiences that lead him to empathize with a black man unfairly arrested.

As for me, I heard a person who has behaved stupidly.

Love,
K-B

31 July 2009

First Energy Corporation

Dear Ms. or Sir,

Thank you for the refund check for $67.98 from my mother’s JCP&L account. It’s a nice little amount that might lend Mother lots of good fun, except for one glitch: The check is made out to my father.

This poses a problem because Father keeled over by the fishpond so many years ago, we can now joke about it, although we still sorely miss him, of course.

Unfortunately, Bank of America has no sense of humor. (The existence of BofA’s heart is also in doubt.) Consequently, I cannot deposit the refund check. So, we’d be most appreciative if you were to cancel the enclosed check and reissue the refund in Mother’s name.

If this is not within the realm of possibilities, a check made out to Mrs. Tillman Gressitt might unpucker Bank of America’s sphincter.

What do you say?

Thanks for your consideration.

Sincerely,
K-B