It’s about Texas, after all, where even wildflowers have names no longer acceptable in contemporary America.
The elderly in Texas still call one of the many cone flowers “niggerheads.” Look into the Texas Almanac and you’ll find equal-opportunity insults built into most wildflowers’ names. This isn’t just a Texas problem — these names proliferate across America. Challenge an old-timer in Nebraska or Texas or Maine and you’ll get a polite but unabashed response suggesting you may be making a mountain out of a molehill. At worst you’ll hear “Aw, get over it!”
Perry’s problem* is that, while you can’t so easily erase a elderly Texan’s memory of wildflowers, you can — for sure — get some offensive paint off a stone slab, or at least flip the stone.
Paint Creek, Tex. — In the early years of his political career, Rick Perry began hosting fellow lawmakers, friends and supporters at his family’s secluded West Texas hunting camp, a place known by the name painted in block letters across a large, flat rock standing upright at its gated entrance.
“Niggerhead,” it read. …WaPo
*Perry’s problem, as we all know, isn’t just racism and isn’t just Perry’s. It’s a solid, apparently ineradicable, part of the right’s thinking: be considerate of your own kind but t’ hell with everyone else. Unless, of course, you need something from them. And Perry does, after all, need votes.
Cross posted from the blog Prairie Weather.