In the Immortal Words of the Joker
in the first Tim Burton Batman movie, “I’m glad you’re dead! Hee hee hee hee! I’m glad he’s dead!” Jesse Walker’s Hit&Run item about the general lack of notice to the death last week of former Georgia governor Lester Maddox brought this quotation fit on.
I actually remember Lester Maddox appearing on the TV news once when I was a kid. It was actually a broadcast of one of his campaign commercials, in which he pronounced that “The only reason the [bad word] want civil rights is because the [bad word] want our white women!” This was in the early seventies, and I remember wondering, in my naive youth, well, what the hell anyone was doing saying something like that in the seventies. Nobody would like talk like that. Eventually I got out more. But I think Maddox had already hit his high water mark regardless.
As a right winger I have something of a high threshold when it comes to other people’s prejudice. I figure most everybody in the world, of whatever hue and creed, has their tics. But decent people keep it to themselves - not everybody makes a hobby of their bigotries, let alone, like Lester Maddox, a career. If it turns out Lester Maddox renounced the vicious programmatic racism of his youth, and middle age, and early dotage when I wasn’t looking, I’ll take the Joker’s words back, otherwise, hee hee hee, I’m glad he’s dead.
