Worse Than Florida, Worse Than Texas, Worse Than Mississippi

Arizona has really done it now: something so horrible, it has made Wonkette - Wonkette! - abandon any attempt at snark, humor or fart jokes for pure, burning outrage.

Ken Layne:

Hard to find even the Gallows Humor in this story, so maybe we won’t even try. Maybe it’s time to admit that large chunks of America are in the hands of unreconstructed racists and vulgar idiots, and that the popular election of a black man as president just might’ve pushed these furious, economically doomed old white people into a final rage that is going to end very, very badly. Ready? Here you go: An Arizona elementary school mural featuring the faces of kids who attend the school has been the subject of constant daytime drive-by racist screaming, from adults, as well as a radio talk-show campaign (by an actual city councilman, who has an AM talk-radio show) to remove the black student’s face, and now the school principal has ordered the faces of the Latino and Black students to be changed to Caucasian skin.

This is America, in 2010, and there’s a dozen more states and endless white-trash municipalities ready to Officially Adopt this same Official Racist Insanity.

From the Arizona Republic:

A group of artists has been asked to lighten the faces of children depicted in a giant public mural at a Prescott school. The project’s leader says he was ordered to lighten the skin tone after complaints about the children’s ethnicity ….

R.E. Wall, director of Prescott’s Downtown Mural Project, said he and other artists were subjected to slurs from motorists as they worked on the painting at one of the town’s most prominent intersections.

“We consistently, for two months, had people shouting racial slander from their cars,” Wall said. “We had children painting with us, and here come these yells of (epithet for Blacks) and (epithet for Hispanics).”

The children depicted on the mural, as we mentioned before but feel compelled to repeat, are little kids who go to the school — “a K-5 school with 380 students and the highest ethnic mix of any school in Prescott. Wall said thousands of town residents volunteered or donated to the project.”

And these children, for the past several months as this happy mural encouraging “green transportation” was being painted by local artists, have been treated to the city of Prescott’s finest citizens driving by and yelling “Nigger” and “Spic” at this school wall painted with pictures of the children who attend the school.

And now the faces are being painted white, “because of the controversy.”

Remember where you were, when you could still laugh about teabaggers and racists and Arizonans, because funny time is almost over. If the unemployment keeps up — one in five adult white males has no job and will never have a job again — and people keep walking away from their stucco heaps they can’t afford and the states and cities and counties and towns keep passing their aggressive racist laws to rile up the trash even more, shit’s going to very soon become very bad, and whether it’s the National Guard having wars in the Sunbelt Exurbs against armies of crazy old white people who are finally using their hundreds of millions of guns, or whole Latino neighborhoods burned to the ground the way the Klan used to burn down black neighborhoods a century ago, we are in for a long dark night and no light-colored paint is going to fix that.

No, not about racism, not at all.

Forgive us Ken Layne, for reposting the entire thing, including the illustration.

Here's why they are right when they say Wonkette has hands-down The. Best. Commenters. On. The. Internet:

Jerk Cade: "This is a wonderful lesson for the grade-school kids.

“when bullies are mean to you, try and appease them so they’ll leave you alone.” "

Prommie: "Ken, its good you are serious here. First, I quipped, but then, I cried. They want it, they want a new civil war, these armies of pigfuckers out there, they fantasize about killing us, you and me, and everyone like us, everyone who comments here. They hate us with all thats in them, and they fondle their guns and dream of killing us.

Think Rwanda."

JMP: "Nice cowardly principal there, giving the KKK types exactly what they want; this will only encourage them to keep going."

13ollocks To The Rules: "Why stop with the murals? - “cauc” up the actual browns and blacks so their dark pelts don’t offend good God-fearin’ Arizonian eyes. And then make them wear little patches sewn onto their clothes so we can tell the Real people from the Colored people."

If you listen carefully, you can already hear the sound of breaking glass.