Culling Out the Undesirables

THE VERY MOMENT you think American culture can sink no lower, it does. We shouldn't be surprised, but we are. Maybe we just don't want to believe it. The smug, self satisfied dismissive indifference of our upper middle class to - everything save itself - ceaselessly amazes and amuses. Better to laugh than to cry and break things. In Baton rouge, that bastion of progressive egalitarian thought, the rich want to put a wall around themselves and shut out the poor. They may even want to move the poor onto a reservation, bulldoze their shanties, and put up a gleaming gilded country club, exclusive, membership by invitation only. The wealthy and almost wealthy want their own seperate school district for their very special Izod children, and they do not want the poor kids from the wrong side of the tracks, the kids of color, to have any part of it. Why should they the achievers pay the lion's share of property taxes, they reason, only to allow the less fortunate, the less successful, to ride their coat tails, like a bunch of moochers? Let the poor pay for their own meager schools, with their own meager taxes, drawn from their own meager assets? Let 'em eat cake! There shall remain of our cities but the wind that blew through them! Similar movements have begun in other southern states. Please recall that in this benighted part of the country, it took the American people one hundred years to stop pouting about the liberation of the slaves, one hundred hyears to begin treating African-Americans like human beings, and then, only at the point of a federal bayonet, by court order. Now they will get their revenge upon the poor. In the earthquakes to come, it is to be hoped I shan't allow bitterness to quench my cigar's glow. At the day of reckoning, when the upper middle class American southern baptist minions come before their vengeful but just God, amy they be sent receive their just rewards, post haste.