Dogtown, Arkansas
As any pooch owner knows, a dog will eat its own vomit.
Catholic theologians hundreds of years ago used this doggy behavior to illustrate how humans return to their sins time after time after time.
In America, sometimes our conscience gives a great heave and we vomit up our thick, ugly racism.
But we always come back to eat it again.
Some people say slavery is "America's original sin," which is true but doesn't include the part about us throwing that sin up and then eating it again.
In Arkansas, a couple of white guys with shaky pasts have begun to build an all-white community. To live there, you have to prove a pedigree of whiteness.
The circle is complete. The vomit is eaten again.
By the way, if constant reference to eating your own puke is making you a little queasy, good. Racism is supposed to make you queasy.
Ten years ago, on my second beer with a buddy of mine, I told him it wouldn't be that hard to legislate Jim Crow back into existence.
"You couldn't call it 'Jim Crow;'" I said. You couldn't call it 'segregation,' either.
"If you wanted to make it legal for businesses to refuse to serve black customers, you'd call it the 'American Small Business Choice Act,' and if you wanted to create all white neighborhoods, you'd call it the 'American Neighborhood Freedom Act.'"
"And you could say it was perfectly fair because black people could refuse to serve whites in their businesses, and they could build their own neighborhoods," I said. "That's American. That's freedom. That's choice."
You can't move into the new community if you're gay, either, although that's a tough one to prove. If you're a man, don't show up in a dress. If you're a woman, make sure your hair is long and you ARE wearing a dress.
As I suggested, the new community is not called "Jim Crow City" or even "Whitesville."
Nope. The new town is called "Return to the Land" because the land, the sun and the sky were all given to white people by God.
Way back when we invented factories and offices, the white people left the land. They moved to the cities where they were polluted by contact with all manner of black and brown people, and Jews, and guys who kiss each other on the mouth.
The white people grew weak, and their daughters started getting the big belly from black guys and Mexican guys. Some of the white people's children even claimed they were not the gender announced at their gender reveal party.
This could not stand.
And so, back to the land, back to a big mouthful of America's ancestral racist puke.
A community that keeps you out unless you're white or straight is no doubt illegal, and will probably be proven so in front of a court. This is because activist judges are forever meddling with things like the law.
Back we go. Back to the land. A dog returning to its own vomit.
To find out more about Marc Dion, and read words by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle and iBooks.
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