Roy Exum: The Lamar Rants

  • Wednesday, November 14, 2018
  • Roy Exum
Roy Exum
Roy Exum

Being a child of the South, I’ve marveled at our funny sayings for all of my life. I’ve been at a football game and heard a disgruntled fan in the stands say of his team’s quarterback, “That boy couldn’t play dead in a cowboy movie.” I’ve been at the Sunday supper table and heard, “I’m of a mind each one of his sermons is better than the next.”

And I’ve sat in a Saturday morning barber shop and heard, “If common sense were lard most people wouldn’t be able to grease a pan,” And then there was the day at the Ole Miss fraternity house when one of the brothers, mad at another about something, shouted out at lunch, “Your momma’s got enough wrinkles to hold an 8-day rain.”

I’ve been in the back seat of a car when one of our darlings, needing a restroom bad, allowed, “My eyeballs are floating.” We were walking to class one day when a chum spied a guy with buck teeth, “Lawd, he could eat corn through a picket fence.” And if a boy got a little too taken with himself, you’d hear, “He’s so goofy he thinks the sun comes up just to hear him crow.”

People who aren’t from the South never get the nuance but, brother, you stop for gas in south Mississippi and overhear a man telling another, “It’s so miserable hot I just saw two trees fighting over a dog,” and you know ‘xactly what’s said. I’m telling you, the sayings will leave you “grinning like a possum eating a sweet potato.”

In a couple of weeks they’ll have a run-off vote for a Senate race in Mississippi. “Miss Cindy” Hyde-Smith, a white Republican, is in the finals against an African-American Democrat, Mike Espy, and some carpet-bagger dug up a video tape of her saying, “Oh, I adore that man … if he invited me to a public hanging I’d sit on the first row.”

I hardly need to explain no event could be quite so hideous but the meaning is you’d darn near endure anything out of love and respect for a friend.. But, oh no! Some carpetbagger liberal is pounding the drum, saying it is the most racist, vulgar reflection of the state that anyone could imagine. “Miss Cindy” cast the allegation aside, rightly calling the saying “an exaggerated expression of regard,” and added any attempt to turn what she said “into a negative connotation is ridiculous.” (Honest: I’ve heard what she said many times in my life.)

Bravo for her. I don’t know when I have been as repulsed by those who want to make any and everything racist. Look at the Georgia governor’s race, where the real issues have been trampled because two worthy candidates have gotten swept up by the trash among us who have molded it into black-versus-white. Same thing in Florida where, once again, two men – both with promise –are pitted against each other with the color of their skin a huge non-issue.

Now comes our newest Memphis Belle, a black woman who ran unopposed because nobody in their right mind wants a thing to do with the 10th most dangerous city in the United States. London Lamar went on Facebook after winning the District 91 House seat and said flat out, “Tennessee is racist. Period. Period. Like, Tennessee is racist!”

She also said, “Most of the Tennesseans who voted Republican are uneducated,” when, in fact, she’s now far-and-away our most notable dunce. What bring such spells of idiocy along? What did she possibly hope to accomplish with such moronic garbage? And, worst of the worst, she got elected!

Lamar observed, “White men voted Republican over … well over 60 or 70 percent … so that’s obviously a particular base of people who believe in superiority. They don’t believe in sharing their wealth. They don’t believe in sharing resources. They believe you need to work for your own, and they went to the polls and they voted.”

Lamar’s remarks have hurriedly been taken down from Facebook but her belief in her self-worth to the people of Tennessee has not diminished a bit. Before her hasty squelch of her rant, several news sites copied her rash behavior and there are copies now springing up everywhere. I don’t know what she wanted to happen but, man, she is getting eaten alive across the country.

“Let’s just call a spade a spade. Tennessee is racist. Period,” Lamar says in her selfie video. “Most of the Tennesseans who voted Republican are uneducated. So, they don’t even know that they showed up to the polls to vote against their own interest … “They literally voted on color lines.”

More from Lamar: “After a review of the numbers after the midterm election, I felt the need to record a Facebook live video to discuss the numbers from both Tennessee and nationwide,” Lamar wrote in the apology post on Monday.

“My comments did not intend to make a generalization about every white person who voted Republican. The truth about a large number of those who responded with their vote for Republican candidates this election cycle is, they voted in response to the racially charged rhetoric that has come from our President…

“In my video I made one mistake and that was an over-generalization of white people and for that I sincerely apologize,” she said. “However, we must not discount the election day data. We live in a state that is very racially polarized. When you look at the needs of rural west, middle and east, the democratic values speaks to their needs. I sincerely desire for the great state of Tennessee to give the democratic values a chance to work for all people.”

If you were to ask me, London Lamar just made a name for herself in the worst imaginable way. Stupid has nothing to do with a person’s color, political bent, income, or level of education.

royexum@aol.com

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