Louisiana Voice

I’ve been on the watch for the pre-filing of bills for the upcoming legislative session that would attempt to make it illegal for teachers in Louisiana’s public schools to teach about this country’s history of slavery or of the genocide of the Native Americans.

Cade Brumley saved legislators the trouble today.

The State Superintendent of Education said there was nothing in his plans for the state’s social studies standards that would “indoctrinate” students on the nation’s radial history.

I can draw one of only two possible conclusions from that: he is either in bed with the radical Repugnantcan Party or he is scared of them and afraid of losing his job.

Either way, it was a cowardly position to take. The Civil War is the darkest chapter of our history and the cause of that war, denials in some quarters notwithstanding, was the issue of slavery.

We can close our eyes to the shameful practice of enslaving other human beings and we can ignore the fact that we at one time we considered enslaved black people as only 3/5 OF A HUMAN but we cannot erase the fact that it happened.

We cannot change the fact that an estimated 5 million to 15 million Native Americans were killed in the name of westward expansion, the so-called Manifest Destiny.

President Andrew Jackson instituted the policy of Indian removal and his successor, Martin Van Buren ordered the roundup and imprisonment of Cherokees in a similar manner in which the Nazis rounded up the Jews in the Warsaw Ghettos a century later. Some 16,000 Cherokee were marched from Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina and Alabama to Oklahoma. Along the way about 3,000, nearly 20 percent of the total number, died, giving birth to the TRAIL OF TEARS.

Will there be no mention of how Japanese-Americans were rounded up and forced to live in internment camps during WWII?

That won’t be taught because, as they say, the winners write the history books. But it ain’t history, it’s propaganda.

Now since Brumley is so set against the so-called critical race theory concept, public school kids probably won’t learn about the Holocaust, either, though I’d wager the Battle of the Alamo will continue to be taught.

But never mind all that. Like Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis says, we don’t want white folks to feel uncomfortable about being white – let’s just make black folks and brown folks uncomfortable about their skin tones. Jesus! DeSantis is hellbent on becoming Donald Trump 2.0 and now our spineless education superintendent is pandering to that same milquetoast mindset.

What have we become in this country, this state? Are we so feeble-minded that we are afraid to expose our foibles? Are we so shallow that we must constantly look over our shoulder to see what Big Brother is thinking of our actions? Why are we so intimidated by the likes of Ted “Cancun” Cruz, Josh Hawley, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Gym Jordan, Ron Johnson, Donald Trump, DeSantis, et al? Why wo we continue to elect people like John Kennedy, Steve Scalise, Mike Johnson, and Clay Higgins?

It’s a damn shame when we cannot face ourselves in the mirror of history.

“I have been clear about this for some time that CRT would not be included in our standards,” Brumley sniffed. “[W]e would be cognizant that nothing in the standards could open the door for any form of indoctrination,”

What the hell is he talking about? Indoctrination? Seriously? This is history, man, and you cannot change history. It happened and ignoring it will not change that.

You want to really piss off African Americans? Pretend they don’t matter, that they were never beaten, whipped, and yes, enslaved.

I’m lily-white, so I don’t presume to understand how they must feel toward us. But I can say with certainty that had my ancestors been held in bondage and considered 3/5 of a human being, I might well harbor some resentment towards the ones whose ancestors enslaved them – especially if today, they ignored that part of history, if they continued to try to take away my right to vote, if they used fire hoses and attack dogs on me when I marched for my rights, if they tried to shut me out of educational opportunities, out of meaningful jobs, out of society itself.

You cannot ignore 12 percent of population. You cannot run them through the LSU football and basketball programs, cheer for them as heroes, and then discard them like yesterday’s news when their eligibility is up.

You have to treat people with some dignity whether you like it or not.

My grandfather drilled into me the conviction that you can take a lot of things from a man, but never take his dignity.

Cade Brumley, with Tuesday’s pronouncement, has thumbed his nose at the dignity of African Americans, Native Americans, and, if his moratorium extends to the Holocaust, Jews.

We should be reminded of that callousness every day because it resides in every member of our congressional delegation but one. It will be a dominant issue in this year’s legislative session, it already permeates the U.S. Congress and if allowed to fester, it will destroy this country from within like a cancer.

There were some initial problems in subscribing to my new blog, injustice4all.net but they’ve been corrected.

The new blog will be dedicated to tracking abuses by law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and judges.

Se will be doing this on a national basis because, like the no-knock shooting in Minneapolis by cops, the wholesale funneling of juveniles into a facilitiy in which judges had a financial interest, and the withholding of exculpatory evidence by prosecutors.

While the vast majority of these public servants protect the citizenry and administer justice the way it should be done, misconduct by cops, judges and prosecutors is prevelant enough to warrant attention.

And it’s not a local problem. No state or municipality is unique; it’s a national problem and it’s growing. Orleans Parish’s own former District Attorney Harry Connick, Sr. was notorious for withholding exculpatory evidence and he sent John Thomas to death row for 17 years by that method.

Injustice4all.net is up and running and you can subscribe for $5 per month or $50 for a year.

It’s All TheIRS is my latest book about what happens when the IRS picks on the wrong person.

It’s fiction, of course, because no one in his right mind will take on the IRS, which has the resources of the Treasury Department and the Justice Department on its side to put down any protest from an average American citizen.

The IRS never seems to go after the large corporations with the same zeal it does with the typical American taxpayer. That’s because the corporate giants have the financial resources and the legal minds to fight back. Ordinary citizens don’t have these weapons at their disposal. But Scott Tanner is no ordinary citizen. He’s a former investigative reporter for a Fort Worth newspaper and he knows how to start a grassroots movement.

With the help of the newspaper, social media, and an unexpected source from within the IRS, he launches a real tax rebellion – not a TEA Party – that produces real results.

It’s All TheIRS, while fiction, is frighteningly realistic in that it draws upon actual events involving the IRS to show the methods the agency can – and will – use and just how far it is willing to go to destroy lives.

You can get your copy by clicking on the yellow DONATE button in the column to the right of this post and paying $25 by credit card or you can mail a check for $25 to Tom Aswell, P.O. Box 922, Denham Springs, Louisiana 70727.

It’s been 21 years since I did my last gig at the Baton Rouge Funny Bone. Some say I should’ve gotten out before my 1999 New Year’s Eve finale. Perhaps they’re right because after 15 years at the club, most everyone in Baton Rouge had heard my joke. When the audience blurts out your punch line before you get to it, it’s time to go.

My most humiliating moment onstage came one night when there were only about 20 people in the entire club. At the time, we had three comics each show: me, as emcee, the middle, or feature act, and the headliner. As emcee, my job was to warm up the audience and get them ready for the feature act and headliner.

This particular night, there were three women sitting together right down front. They had their arms crossed, which is bad body language that practically screamed to me: “I ain’t laughing at anything, clown boy.” So, I concentrated on trying to make them laugh, reasoning that if they laughed, I had the entire room.

Nothing I did worked, so I resorted to talking to them. I usually talked to people in the audience because that was a good way to loosen them up if I could play off their responses to make a joke. But I got nothing. Finally, I asked what they did for a living. It turned out that all three were law students in Tulane Law School. No problem. I had a number of lawyer jokes that I rolled out.

Still nothing. Finally, out of desperation, I told them that I had done my best material and even tried lawyer jokes, so what would they like to hear?

Without missing a beat, one of them replied, “Humor.”

Any entertainer should know when he has lost the fight. I bailed and brought up the feature act.

Despite that one show, I had a great run working for Mike Rogers at the Funny Bone. It gave me the courage to promote my own shows in Mandeville, Hattiesburg, Natchez and, the most successful of all, in a monthly show at a place called Augustine’s in Hammond.

At Augustine’s each month, I would bring in an established comic to headline the show. It usually was one who had performed at the Baton Rouge Funny Bone whom I knew to be a strong act. To round out the bill, I gave stage time to a number of amateur comics from the Baton Rouge and New Orleans area.

New Orleans was especially fertile ground for aspiring comics, so I always had a well-staffed show at Augustine’s with as many as five or six locals to go up before the headliner.

One headliner was an African-American comic who had been burned in a freak gasoline fire when he was fueling his car. His best line was, “Between me, Michael Jackson, and Richard Pryor, we have proved beyond a doubt that black people are flammable.”

One of those who made the monthly pilgrimage from New Orleans to Hammond was a resident of internal medicine at Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans. A Korean, he played off his ethnicity, tossing out lines like “We industrious Koreans think the Japanese are lazy.” Not exactly political correctness, but hey, this was comedy and nothing is sacred.

His name was KEN JEONG . A licensed physician, he gave up his practice of medicine to concentrate on a movie career. You may have seen him as the hilarious Mr. Chow in the Hangover trilogy (he’s the one who jumped stark-naked out of the trunk of a car in the original Hangover movie. It was his wife’s idea to do that).

More recently, he has appeared as a regular panelist on the Fox Network’s The Masked Singer, a show I have never watched because I equate it with cheap substitutes for entertainment like Bachelor, Bachelorette, Dancing with the Stars, Survivor, and other low-cost productions designed to seduce us into a lobotomized state. (Sorry, Ken, but I’m just not into such low-brow entertainment).

But last week, during taping of the show, Ken STALKED OFF THE SET in apparent disgust over the revelation of one of the masked singers on the show.

And who was the masked singer who was unmasked, drawing the ire of Ken Jeong?

None other than former New York City Mayor and current Trump apologist and fellow conspirator Rudy “hands in his pants” Giuliani.

Ken was infuriated to see Giuliani behind the mask because his background as a doctor stoked his anger. He considers Giuliani as part of the administration that bungled the COVID-19 pandemic in its early stages.

I know there are the usual trolls who will trash me for this, but I don’t really care. I am proud of Ken Jeong and his courage to walk off the set of a show aired by Fox Network. If the trolls have anything to say about my comedy career that never really got off the ground except for a few dozen corporate shows on each coast or if they don’t like what I write, they don’t have to read these posts.

Meanwhile, if I ever get the chance, I will shake Ken Jeong’s hand and hope he remembers me.

Anyone who has ever had a bad experience with the IRS (is there any other kind of experience?), anyone who has ever been audited, or anyone who has ever even paid income taxes will want to read my latest book.

It’s All TheIRS is the story of Scott Tanner who is assessed penalties and interest totaling more than $600,000 because of the failure of a former business partner to pay his taxes. When he learns that the deadbeat’s ex-wife is being assessed the same amount, in effect allow the IRS to collect twice on a single debt, he decides to fight back.

It’s All TheIRS chronicles the pair’s battle with an agency that refuses to listen to reason or to accept their explanations. The book is fiction, of course (no one in his right mind chooses to fight the IRS), but it contains numerous actual events in which the agency steamrolls its victims. One example is the story (true) about the IRS padlocking a day care center because of a tax liability. When parents came to get their children, the IRS attempted to force the parents to sign promissory notes to pay the day care’s penalties.

The cover design is by Jeanette Herren of West Monroe and it features a photo of the U.S. Treasury.

To see the cover, click here:

You can order a copy of the book by clicking on the DONATE button in the column to the right of this post and pay $25 by credit card or you may sent a $25 check to Tom Aswell, P.O. Box 922, Denham Springs, Louisiana 70727