Those Tiresome Race Wars

Sadly, they let anybody with the right equipment onto the Internet: the stupid, the insane, the just plain ornery. This is a shame since it spoils it for the rest of us who might want only to keep up with the news and our friends. Try as I might to avoid getting into those moronic spats with total strangers, but sometimes they are unavoidable.

The Fabulous Janis Joplin

For example, I recently entered a stream on my friend's Facebook page about historic rock singers, and innocently wrote that Janis Joplin was the best! That's only my opinion, of course, since there is no way to prove such a thing, especially since she's been dead for many years. But still, some guy whose last name is GROSS-MAN (the hyphen is mine), took umbrage at that and started nit-picking away at me, claiming that Janis was nothing but a "drunken slut" and that many black jazz singers who preceded her were much better, and that Janis was only copying them, and thus I must be "insanely ignorant" and nothing but a dumb "white hippie."

Well, excuse me but I was a white hippie, having been born at the right time in history. I attended the Woodstock Music Festival and went to the Fillmore East almost every weekend when I lived in NYC. Naturally I went to other venues as well. I saw many singers and groups perform, and most of them were great. But the one concert that still stands out for me all these years later was Janis Joplin at Madison Square Garden. The show was beyond the norm, as was Janis displaying her God-given talents for more than two hours straight. 

So the race wars continue, with people like the current White House press secretary, a dumb cluck if ever there was one, in a powerful position way over her head but she's black so who cares. I wonder -- if Janis had been black, would those tiresome, virtue-signaling Democrats stand up for her now?