Nickel Rant^tm:
 Please Don't Throw Us in the Briar Patch!

by Edgar J. Steele

June 14, 2007

My name is Edgar J. Steele.  This is a Nickel Rant.

"Do anything you want!  You can do anything!  You can throw me in the water.  You can throw me off the cliff.  But please don't throw me in the briar patch!"  Thus pleaded Bre'r Rabbit, who had become stuck to the lump of tar dressed up in clothes and set out as a trap by Bre'r Bear. 

An overly-proud Bre'r Rabbit had taken silence from the "tar baby" in the face of his own greeting as a personal slight and kicked out in retaliation.  His foot stuck, then his fist.  The harder Bre'r Rabbit struggled to free himself, the more securely he became entrapped. 

Bre'r Bear slowly drew up to the normally-elusive Bre'r Rabbit and considered what to do, now that he finally had captured his nemesis.

America's current predicament in the Middle East is quite like that in which Bre'r Rabbit found himself.  The harder the Bush Regime struggles, the more firmly stuck America becomes with problems of her own creation.  Problems stemming from vanity, greed and overweening ambition. 

Suddenly, we find ourselves eyeball to eyeball, once again, with Mother Russia.  America's media is demonizing Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, and refusing to accurately report the warnings he has given:  "for the first time in history - and I want to emphasize this - there are elements of the U.S. nuclear capability on the European continent. It simply changes the whole configuration of international security," said Putin at his recent press conference that you never read about.

Has Putin any choice?  We have backed him into a corner by installing military bases throughout the Middle East, taking the old Iron Curtain satellites into NATO and, now, seeking to install missiles all around Russia herself.  But they are merely defensive missiles, you say?  There is no such thing as a defensive nuclear weapon, grasshopper.  Just what do you suppose JFK might do in Putin's place?

Bre'r Rabbit's entreaty to Bre'r Bear is an American classic, one that imparts an important moral lesson, like all good fables and folk stories, yet one that is disappearing down the memory hole, pushed there by those who seek to eradicate America's sense of her own origins.  One might well infer that there is no room in politically-correct America today for morality.

For younger readers unacquainted with fictional narrator "Uncle Remus," the Bre'r Rabbit stories are a compilation of Deep South folk tales, allegedly originating in Black plantation-slave oral traditions, but preserved in writing by White writers, most notably Joel Chandler Harris.