President Anne's Address on the Occasion of Martin Luther King Jr. Day

My fellow Americans,

Nine years ago, when Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States, many folks (myself included) believed that we had moved beyond the corrosive racism and prejudice that marked much of our nation's history. But most of the people who thought Obama's inauguration signaled an end to prejudice were, themselves, white.

Black people knew differently. They knew that the pulse of racism still beat strongly in America. They weren't optimistic about change. They saw the blow-back coming. It's no coincidence that Black Lives Matter was formed during the Obama administration. Even as President Obama sought to widen the safety net with affordable health care and protections for the poor, ordinary Black Americans faced an America that was "business as usual" -- police brutality, wage inequality, and fewer opportunities than white Americans enjoyed. Indeed, I have had Black friends tell me they weren't one bit surprised by the election of Donald Trump, they fully expected a racist to follow Obama into office.

Sure enough, that's what we got. A racist chief executive, with racist advisers, encouraging the most virulent racist behavior and indulging in it themselves. Now that we have seen this behavior elevated to the national stage in an unprecedented way, it is time for me to ask you: What can you do about this?

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. didn't waste his wrath on the loudest racists. He reserved his scorn instead for the good people who did nothing. In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, Dr. King wrote: "Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will." How many of us blush a bit as we realize we are the "shallow people of good will?" I know I do.

And so, my fellow Americans, I would ask you: What can we "people of good will" do to deepen our commitment to absolute racial justice in our nation? We need to start in our own homes and communities, forging ties with minority citizens so that we can better understand their plight. We need to find government leaders who will actively seek to end racist practices in America, and vote for those leaders. We need to look our brothers and sisters of other races in the eye and witness their experience as citizens from their point of view.

We need to pay more than just lip service to the quest for racial equality in America. Because if we don't do anything, and the racists do something, then Black lives won't appear to matter at all.

Let us re-dedicate ourselves to the kind of America that would vote -- twice -- for an African American president. Let us be mindful of the needs of our fellow citizens and willing to assist them in their quest for equality and justice. And let us denounce, in no uncertain terms, any actions, any gatherings, any speakers, who advocate for a racist agenda. This hate is off the plate. Now and forevermore.

On this important day, I commend all Americans who took part in community service in their neighborhoods, in their cities, and in their school. Bright blessings upon you. You are the change that we need in this great nation. Keep up the good work! 

Finally, I wish to use this occasion to re-instate, immediately, all protections and benefits afforded to those in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Dreamers, your months of fear and anxiety are over. Your path to full citizenship is clear. We embrace you with open arms and encourage your wildest dreams -- because it was the dreams and plans of all the immigrants before you to become successful in America, and look at all they have done!

I make this announcement today in the spirit of justice, which was what Dr. King dedicated his life to pursuing. We will have justice for all in America. We will again be the land of opportunity. We will be a force for good in the world, and at home.

Thank you, and Gods bless America.

In Which I Find a Job for Steve Bannon

It's been a few weeks now since I, Anne Johnson, was asked to take over the presidency of the United States of America. Wow, what a job! It's nonstop. I've been pretty much overwhelmed trying to track down trusted advisers from previous administrations in order to fill all the posts that have either been open, or worse, filled with evil warlords from the pit of Hell.

The warlords are gone. The lot of them, with Bet$y DeVo$ leading the way! So long, chumps! Go back to your billions and leave us alone!

You know what, though? I'm a soft touch.

Poor Steve Bannon. Up on top in April, shot down in May. One's heart bleeds.

EXHIBIT A: NEWLY UNEMPLOYED

I don't know about you, but I've been unemployed a few times in my life. It's so tough. A real sock to the self-esteem and the wallet ... even if it's a layoff due to revised head count. But this is no layoff. This is a straight-out "go the hell away." Steve already looked like he'd seen the bottom of too many bottles of Fireball. What's he to do now, as a middle-aged journalist? Heck, even young journalists can't find a job.

But it's Steve's lucky day! Because I, Anne Johnson, had a good, steady job that I don't need anymore. As president, I will call my former employer and highly recommend Mr. Bannon as a public school teacher for minority students in Camden, New Jersey. Some of you will remember that I got hired on a provisional certificate and then had to earn a teaching license. It'll be a snap for him to do the same!

It's a good job, teaching at the Vo-Tech. The base salary for Step 1 is a solid $47,000 with health benefits (you have to contribute) and a pension plan (you have to contribute and work 10 years to be vested). If you don't need to make more money, you can take the whole summer off. And if you do need money, Mr. Bannon, you can take my summer job and paint the hallways in the school!

I know what you're thinking, reader. You're thinking, "Anne. You would recommend this shameless racist for a teaching job in a school that is 99 percent minority, including a heaping helping of Dreamers?" Yes sirree. That's exactly what I'm doing. No one needs to witness the humanity of minority teenagers more than Steve Bannon. It's so easy to dismiss entire segments of the population with a flick of the lily-white wrist, if you really don't know anyone in that demographic. Quite another thing to hold such contemptible views when kid after kid strolls into your classroom, smiling shyly and saying "good morning."

Steve, I defy you to call for the deportation of Dreamers after one of them grins and holds a door open for you as you ascend three flights of stairs with a home room folder and a travel mug of tea! Sweet kids, Steve. You will love them. Most of them work really hard and listen closely. The hardest workers? The Dreamers. Hands down.

So fret not, Mr. Bannon! You can teach school! I fear your colleagues won't welcome you with open arms, but the kids will be great, so long as you're humble and willing to accord them the respect that all of your fellow humans should receive.

Good luck in your new career, Steve! The first two years are rough, what with night school and weekend lectures at Rowan University (and extra observations and frequent pop-ins by teacher-coaches). But I got through it at just about your age (acknowledging here that your age is hard to determine by looking at you). You'll be just fine.

See? This is how a nation should be governed. With humanity and tenderness and a little bit of counter-intuitive thinking.

My Admiration for Kneeling Athletes is Boundless

On Sunday, Mr. J and I went to see the Baltimore Orioles. We are both huge Orioles fans.

EXHIBIT A: TWO WHITE PEOPLE AT THE BASEBALL PARK

I did something at that game that I have never done before, ever.

I refused to stand for the national anthem.

I've been working with minority teenagers since 2005. I've been teaching them full time since 2009. Let me tell you this, right up front: I cannot stand in their shoes. The gods know I wouldn't want to.

This country is a land mine for people of color, for young Hispanic kids and Dreamers. They're very observant, and smart, and they can see the truth -- how everything is arrayed against them from the day they're born. Don't tell me about affirmative action. It's more mythical than Zeus. Even when minority kids work twice as hard as their Caucasian peers, they are starting out (many of them) with all kinds of subtle and not-so-subtle strikes against them. The strikes follow them right into adulthood. If they live to be adults.

This is where our nation's athletes step in.

EXHIBIT B: THE GREATEST

You want to see courage? Check this out. It's a wonder he lived to pulverize people in the ring.

I'll bet you already knew that Muhammad Ali was stripped not only of his boxing title, but was barred from the ring for three years at the very prime of his career. It's not like he had a trust fund or anything, either. He lived off the kindness of friends, even his opponents for three damn years.

When other people have to worry about their families and their paycheck-to-paycheck salaries, professional athletes can make strong statements about what the world is really like for people like them.

EXHIBIT C: NO FLAGS BURNT, NO PUPPIES HARMED

This is, to me, one of the most compelling photographs of the 20th century. These are American athletes who won running medals in the 1968 Olympics, and they are listening to the national anthem. Is this the frivolous gesture of someone trying to be glib or cute? BAMP! No. Is this a despicable desecration of the greatness of America? BAMP! No. This is a dignified protest of racism. May all the deities of all the pantheons salute these brave men. Because they needed to be brave. They got savage treatment after this incident.

EXHIBIT C: NO SWASTIKA, NO FLAG BURNING, NO FOUL LANGUAGE

So they played the national anthem, and these guys knelt. They were making a statement about police brutality. They are visible members of a minority population in this country.

To me, there is nothing disrespectful to our soldiers, living or dead, in this gesture. (Has anyone asked African American veterans how they feel about this? BAMP! No.) There is no desecration of the flag. There is -- mark my words -- no foul language and no violence urged upon anyone.

I didn't hear these athletes call any policemen sons-of-bitches and demand that they be fired. Did you?

EXHIBIT D: THE REAL UNPATRIOTIC DISGRACE, AND A STAIN ON THE HUMAN RACE TO BOOT

So this guy goes to Atlanta, gathers together some 10,000 of his fellow racists, and dares to call these gracious and principled athletes sons of bitches. How dare he? A man who wouldn't even rent apartments to minorities! Now he is manufacturing prejudice and hate. Whoa, finally successful at manufacturing something.

Everywhere I look on the Internet, I see white people in outrage at the disrespect inherent in kneeling for the national anthem. Readers, I don't know about you, but swearing from a podium and calling for honest, hard-working minority men to be fired is far more disrespectful than kneeling during a song.

One last piece to this rant. We at "The Gods Are Bored" are all about bad form. If our NFL players flipped the bird at the flag, or mooned it, or trampled it or burnt it during the course of a game, I would call that disrespect. But since when is kneeling so damn disrespectful?

EXHIBIT E: SUCH DISRESPECT!

I guess it's a-okay when they do it like this.

The moral of this sermon is simple: Far from being disrespectful, athletes who kneel during the national anthem are exercising their constitutional rights to free expression. They feel keenly the plight of their less fortunate brothers and sisters and want to make a statement about it. Gods bless America that they can't be locked up, tortured, and killed for this behavior! (Even if the Ghoul in Chief wants it done.)

Until the menace Donald Trump leaves office, I will not stand for the national anthem. Nor will I say the pledge of allegiance beyond the first sentence. This is not one nation. Liberty and justice? Ask Colin Kaepernick about justice. It's too late to ask Muhammad Ali.

If I hear the "Star Spangled Banner," I'm going to take a knee and pray to the bored gods to save our land, now, before it's too late.

White Hot Fury over White Supremacists

If you turned 90 years old in 2017 you were too young to fight in World War II.

I know this because my dad was drafted in 1944 but didn't go abroad. The war was nearly over when he mustered in. September 23 would have been his 90th birthday.

All World War II veterans are over 90 years old, except for maybe a very few stragglers who lied about their age. They would be, at best, 87.

And now we have empowered Neo Nazis, marching in the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia.

All the blood, the pain, the loss of life and limb. The loss of sanity. A whole generation profoundly affected by world events. And before the last of them draws a final breath, people in this country are glorifying the very evil that this country opposed!

I'm not even going to start on the Confederate flag, except to say that Sherman should have been more thorough.

In the matter of white supremacy, can I just point something out? Whites are supreme in this country! Their salaries are better than minority citizens, their job prospects are better than minority citizens, their numbers are larger, and they're in charge. You want to see white supremacy? Take a walk on Wall Street and see who's running the world. Look at pictures of our nation's CEOs, strolling together at some exclusive conference. You won't see any minorities there.

The lowest forms of life -- people who blame their own loser status on someone else with a different skin color -- are empowered by our loathsome chief executive, who couldn't bring himself to denounce the white supremacists or the terrorist who plowed through a crowd of counter protesters.

We must resist this. We must stand up against white bigotry and promote the advancement of American minorities. This despicable behavior is unacceptable.

If they came to my town with their damn swastikas and tiki torches, I'd be out there countering them myself.

Donald Trump, go to Hell. And take all your racist followers with you.

Don't Say the Word -- It's That Simple

I don't know about you, but most Friday nights by 10:00 I am drifting off to dreamland in my chair. It just happened that the past two Friday nights I was lucid enough to watch Bill Maher on HBO.

I don't like the guy, even though his politics are similar to my own. I find him pompous, never more so than when he has a Republican guest for an interview. If I treated bored deities the way he treats Republican guests, I'd be smote into oblivion.

So it was that, during an interview with a Republican senator, Maher dropped the "n" word. Hours later, he was issuing apologies and mea culpas. And this Friday, he had three guests of color on the show, probably to prove that he's a cool white dude who loves African Americans and feels their pain.

His Black guests basically took him to the woodshed.

It was typical Maher hubris to invite Ice Cube on the show in the first place. Here's a rapper who has made a lavish living mining his people's pain and injustice, and he wasn't going to give Maher a pass. You go, Mr. Cube. His best remark was, "That's our word. It belongs to us." And it does.

The "n" word should never escape the lips of a white person. Never. Pagan readers, don't you hate it when the word "witch" is used in a pejorative, or even joking, way? Now multiply that by 1,000.

As a teacher in a school that is 99 percent minority, I hear that word all day long. Students call each other "n," in an affectionate way. It's their word. If I'm teaching a passage of literature that has the word in it, I don't utter the word out loud.

Bill Maher had a million excuses for letting the "n" word slip. He blamed the Republican interviewee, for one thing (bad form). He blamed the nature of live comedy (flimsy). He said he shouldn't be judged by one offhand tasteless remark (slightly less flimsy but still flimsy). You know what he didn't do? He didn't say, "I won't use that word again. Ever."

It's tough work being a comedian, especially in live situations. Improv comedy requires a mental acuity that's daunting to say the least. But it's not that hard to expunge your vocabulary of an offensive word and -- this is overlooked -- the racist way it was dropped in reference to a type of slavery. I've never heard Bill Maher call anyone a "cunt." If he can bypass that word, he can remove the "n" word from his oral vocabulary.

I'm sure he will from this day forward, so would it have hurt to promise? Humble people work to change their ways.

Sitting at the top of a mountain of righteousness today I am,

Your most humble and obedient servant,

Anne Johnson