Why White People Laugh

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

AUSTIN, Texas - Nobody is smiling in Dallas these days. Same for Chicago and Mobile, Alabama. A Black man is on the political prowl and both Black and White Americans are nervous. Herman Cain is the man's name and he's riding high in - egads! - the Republican Party's presidential polls. In fact, he hung atop a slew of national polls over the past weekend, there ahead of former frontrunner Willard "Mitt" Romney and James Richard "Rick" Perry.

What a ride it's been for the former president of Godfather Pizza, a man with zero political experience and with no desire to act like one.

Well, that's the myth.

Cain has been stir-crazy during the last week, telling people in the South that, if elected president, he will not only build a 20-foot-tall fence along the entire southern border, but that he will electrify it, as well. He followed that by telling David Gregory of Meet The Press that he was joking when he said it. Trouble is Cain wrote a book a few years back in which he talked about widening the Rio Grande into a huge moat and stocking it with alligators, adding that anyone able to swim the moat and escape the gators would, well, get a job in the U.S.!

Oh, if only African-American comedian Dick Gregory could hear this. Gregory loved a good Black story, but he had a way with dressing-down uppity Black folk. Cain was in Washington, D.C. to appear on the Sunday TV talk show, a day President Obama spent at the new Martin Luther King Memorial on the Washington Mall. Cain did not bother. Gregory would have chewed him up and then spit him out. Richard Pryor? Pryor would have gone after Cain fist-first.

Cain is not Black; he is a Republican.

It is a phenomenon among some Black and some Brown Americans. They would rather play the GOP doormats than even begin to believe that the only freakin' party for them is the Democratic Party. Cain is old enough to have been alive during the Civil Rights Movement, but he feigns even ever hearing about it. He was a big cheese with his piza outfit, and he would like all of us to know that he was no one's slave and that he never lived in the ghetto and that he never even like The Temptations or Diana Ross and The Supremes.

Cain wasn't that kind of Black.

Well, he did sing. Once. That's him in the photo atop this story, in jazzy white robes while singing a take-off of John Lennon's classic, Imagine. Cain has no idea. He mouths his stupid lyrics as if some cheap-road cult leader, seemingly believing that it's funny to throw out this absurdity: "Imagine there's no pizza..."

He is a joke.

And the only saving grace here is that he is kissing Republican you-know-what like some southern bootblack eager to shine Massa's boots ahead of a whupping in the plantation woodshed where the lashings quickly ripped black skin apart, especially skin off the back of a Negroe who didn't know his place. Their documented words, not mine.

But, then, Cain likely believes such things never happened...

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