Like to see Garrison Keillor do something with that!
But of such diffused responsibility . . . You can’t very well charge with murder every one who showed up to watch. It’s like a stoning – the guilt attaches to all but to none, because none can say he threw the fatal stone.
It is. Murder is a state crime. The problem was, very often, state prosecutors wouldn’t charge lynchers, especially lynchers of blacks, if they thought the lynching was “justified”. What the NAACP and other groups fought for was a federal anti-lynching law, which would have made lynching a federal crime. That way, the Federal government could arrest people for lynching in those cases where state and local officials didn’t.
I didn’t like Bush or the crazy folk in his administration. But I’d be squirming in the bleachers if I saw this kind of mockery in a public, non-political forum. Just like I’m uncomfortable at work whenever one of my fellow liberals bashes conservatives in mixed company. There’s a time and place to be partisan. A state fair is not one of those times.
State fairs tend to draw a more conservative audience, in my experience. When I volunteered at my state fair back in 2008, I’d say about 70% of the crowd were walking around with Confederate flag paraphernalia and Palin/McCain buttons. In subsequent years the Teaparty crew has come out in droves… Not too many of these folks ever stop by my booth (sponsored by an evil environmental regulatory agency.) I don’t blame them. We don’t have any cute, fuzzy, or slithery animals to play with like the game and inland fishery folks do. We just got recycling bins and a big compost pile to show off.
Did anyone ever hear of Rome? Arena and amphitheater anyone? Gladiators maybe?
Or anyone ever heared of Assyria and what they were known for?
Maybe the term Dark Ages of Europe ring a bell then?
Violence for entertainment did not become a common thing in the past decades or previous century. It didn’t start in the past 400 years and certainly not in North America.
Your talking of something far older than your memory. Nothing new here, move along now.
Oh, by the way… You ain’t seen nothing yet. The worst is yet to come. Just think of when you were in school and how things are now. Mankind’s progress is an ongoing movie and you can watch how it goes from year to year.
Watch and decide which way you think it’s going. 2 Timothy 3:1-4
You misspelled Gore. 
.
Indeed. I’ve been there. People talk like Kentuckians, and it’s deeply in the Bible Belt. This is not The North, it’s The South. It’s a ~7 hour drive to Chicago.
“If you ever start feeling like you have the goofiest, craziest, most dysfunctional family in the world, all you have to do is go to a state fair. Because five minutes at the fair, you’ll be going, ‘You know, we’re alright. Heck, we are dang near royalty.’”
– Jeff Foxworthy
And Bill.
How soon we forget, huh?
Making fun of our elected officials is a cherished American tradition and the most important function of our right to free speech but pretending that this particular display is completely divorced from the centuries of racist violence against black people strains credulity.
Also: “I’m sure some Democrat somewhere did something sort of similar some time” is hands down the lamest rebuttal I’ve read on this board.
If you run a booth again with a compost demo, consider going with Vermicomposting. Red wigglers are crowd pleasers.
This.
Why is it lame when the OP asks about hatred. It’s not a rodeo, but how about SF having a ballot measure to name a sewage plant after Bush Link..
Here (video) is “Bush” appearing with Cryme Tyme on WWE Raw. “Condoleezza Rice? Now there’s one hot black bitch! George Jefferson? He wrote the Declaration of Independence! You know he’s my ni–”
Um, NSFW.
Put that irrelevance away, Christian.
Makes sense. But what about the “lynching was illegal in Texas” bit?
Yes…and nobody ever mocked Bush.
And there were no Bush masks,get a life.
I think he was saying that “open hatred as family fun entertainment” has been going on for quite a long time.
The difference being that the Chicks never repeatedly asked their crowds if they wanted to see Bush gored by a bull at a state-sponsored event. Other than that, exactly the same.
It seems there is so much negative thinking today. What I can’t understand is most of the Obama haters call themselves Christian! We are a very divided country, and united we stand divided we fall!
Bush Jr. had his haters, but not as much was made public about his private life as they do Obama, Some were very angry when he won the Presidency, and decided then to berate him and all of his policies. Most of what Fox calls news is just criticism of any move Obama makes. They(it seems to me) want Democracy to be our way of life as long as it is the way they want it to be, and no way else. Obama was elected by the Majority of Americans, and his policies reflect that. That is how a Democracy works!
Texas passed a specific anti-lynching law in 1897, after the 1893 lynching of Henry Smith. Smith, who was black, was the last person seen with 3 year Myrtle Vance, the daughter of a policeman who had a reputation for abusing prisoners and who had beaten Smith when he had been arrested for drunkenness. He, we’re told, apparently lured her to him with a piece of candy, and told those people who had seen him carrying her that he was taking her to the doctors.
Her body was later found, and he was suspected of the crime. He fled to Arkansas, but was captured and brought back to Paris, Texas, where he was taken to the fairgrounds by a crowd of what grew to about 10,000 people, stripped and fastened to a stake, and then tortured with hot irons by Myrtle Vance’s family for about an hour, at the end of which, he was covered with oil and set on fire.
National outrage and the lynching, and also Governor Hogg’s personal outrage (Hogg, when he heard that Smith had been captured, contacted Paris officials asking that he be protected until he could stand trial, but was told they weren’t going to do anything), led him to introduce an anti-lynching bill, which failed, but got reintroduced each session until it passed in 1897. Unfortunately, it didn’t help Jesse Washington.
Most religions, at least as practiced by the vast majority of the laity, seem to be synonymous with hypocrisy. I don’t know if it is a reflection of religion being out of touch with reality or people being innately hypocritical but compartmentalization among so-called believers seems to be a virtual prerequisite.