08-21-2017, 02:06 PM
(08-21-2017, 12:46 PM)TeacherinExile Wrote: Rest in peace, Dick Gregory. You were a giant among men, a comedian whose biting wit has been matched by few others onstage. And unlike so many celebrities today, whose stances against all manner of injustice amount to little more than "virtue signaling," you put your beautiful black skin in the game when it mattered most, as noted in the post above. We may not see your like again. You will be sorely missed.Isn't that the truth?
This from his obituary in Rolling Stone magazine:
One oft-told Gregory bit was about the comedian's journey to a restaurant in the segregated South. "We tried to integrate a restaurant, and they said, `We don't serve colored folk here,' and I said, `Well, I don't eat colored folk nowhere. Bring me some pork chops.' And then Ku Klux Klan come in, and the woman say, 'We don't have no pork chops,' so I say, 'Well, bring me a whole fried chicken.' And then the Klan walked up to me when they put that whole fried chicken in front of me, and they say, 'Whatever you do to that chicken, boy, we're going to do to you.' So I opened up its legs and kissed it in the rump and tell you all, `Be my guest.' "
And in light of the "fake news" meme that is tossed around so indiscriminately these days, here is one of my favorite Dick Gregory quotations:
"The most difficult thing to get people to do is to accept the obvious."
To tell people the truth, you better make them laugh; otherwise they'll kill you. -- George Bernard Shaw
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.