It’s time to return to Jim Crow laws.
Settle down, Trumpanzees. Not the Jim Crow literacy tests for which you yearn to return. Go retrieve the MAGA ball caps you surely tossed in the air at the prospect (when, exactly, was America great; can you give me a year or even era?).
No, we at the HB call for Jim Crow laws for you. But to make it equal between all parties, let’s make it applicable to every American.
Make no mistake: The Jim Crow laws of the 60’s were an abomination. I unearthed a Jim Crow literacy test from a half century ago, administered to black voters to keep them out of the polls. I challenge any voter, black or white, to ace just the first five questions:
1965 Alabama Literacy Test
1. Which of the following is a right guaranteed by the Bill of Rights?
_____Public Education
_____Employment
_____Trial by Jury
_____Voting
2. The federal census of population is taken every five years.
_____True _____False
3. If a person is indicted for a crime, name two rights which he has.
______________________ ________________________
4. A U.S. senator elected at the general election in November takes office the following year on what date?
_________________________________________________
5. A President elected at the general election in November takes office the following year on what date?
_______________________________________________________
The test went on like that for six pages and 68 questions. I’m not sure your president can even count that high.
No, this test — let’s rename them Jim Croce laws, since the sublime singer appealed to all races and creeds, and loved to skewer dumbasses — would be far fairer.
The Jim Croce test would require to correctly answer just three true-false questions:
- Is the Earth round?
- Is the Earth getting warmer?
- Did dinosaurs live millions of years ago?
I was considering including evolution in there, but realized a Trump base may not know how to pronounce the word, let alone understand it. So we’ll stick to dinosaurs. If you can’t answer those questions, you shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Consider the questions to get a driver’s license; if that requires a provable level of intelligence, shouldn’t voting?
This, of course, would be assailed by the GOP and Mitch “chicken scrotum” McConnell, who somehow seriously claimed last week that proposing making Election Day a holiday was an attempted power grab by those crafty liberals. He similarly would intuit those three questions alone would spell doom for his party.
So let’s just stick with something simpler: Slapfacts. And don’t worry; none will be on the test.
- Chuck Berry had a degree in hairdressing.
- Humans share the planet with as many as 8.7 million different forms of life, scientists estimate.
- John Williams has never seen any of the Star Wars movies he composed the music for.
- More people in America own more than 10 guns than there are people in the whole of Denmark.
- Serbia is home to the World Testicle Cooking Championships.
- California was named after a fictional island in a 16th-century romance novel, Las Sergas de Esplandián (The Adventures of Esplandián).
- Actress Carrie Fisher once delivered a cow tongue inside a Tiffany box to a predatory Hollywood producer who assaulted her friend.
- Before he became an actor, Clint Eastwood survived a plane crash, avoided jellyfish, and swam to shore.
