How a Missouri Rodeo Became a Phony Scandal

If an eccentric, liberal, nudist musician had not attended a rodeo at the Missouri State Fair a week ago Saturday, the world would be a slightly happier place. The State Fair would not have banned rodeo clown Tuffy Gessling for life. The NAACP would not have asked the Secret Service to investigate Tuffy for a "hate crime." His clown colleagues would not have been dispatched to sensitivity training. And race tension nationwide would not have ratcheted up another notch.

But the eccentric in question, Perry Beam, did attend the rodeo. He took his wife and a Taiwanese student with him. When Tuffy donned an Obama mask, Beam grew concerned. When the crowd egged the clown on, Beam grew uneasy. But when another clown started bobbling the lips on the mask, well, that sent Beam "over the top." The student recorded it all on his video camera.

Repelled by what he had seen, the exquisitely sensitive Beam fled the fair with wife and student in tow. The normally inquisitive student asked no questions about what he had witnessed. "In a way," says Beam, "I'm glad. I had no answers for him." They rode the sixty miles home in shamed silence.

The whole affair might have ended on Beam's Facebook page had it not been for the intervention of a professor friend of Beam's, a garden variety leftist named Bob Yates. Beam gives Yates credit for forwarding the information "to the appropriate blogs" and that, says Beam, "got the ball rolling."

CONTINUED:  How a Missouri Rodeo Became a Phony Scandal

Clowning the Os

American Thinker, August 15, 2013

Who has not heard about the "iniquitous", white (and therefore guilty -- like Zimmerman, who of course is not white, but never mind) rodeo clown who donned an Obama mask?

Who has not gotten wind of the Ruling Aristocrat Oprah Winfrey's manufacture of a "racist victimization incident" with a Swiss sales clerk?

In consideration of the content of many conservative articles and comments on the subjects, I am going to be so bold as to suggest that many conservatives still do not want to come to grips with the true function of racial discourse in this country.

As a consequence, many conservative responses are as naïve as they are myopic.

Protestations of the form "look at the Bush masks; look all the Bush hate; the sales clerk wasn't a racist after all and Oprah should apologize" are fruitless, and will continue to be fruitless until matters are set right.

Matters are not going to be set right until Americans take fully on board the brute fact that the "dialogue" on race in this country is, quite literally, psychotic.

That this is so is easily seen by reflection that, for example, the racial "dialogue" we've been hectored about for several decades is in reality no "dialogue" at all; it is a monologue imposed by the powerful in order to decimate the values and individuality of the powerless.

READ MORE:  Clowning the Os