Every Monday at Reran Tragedy, Editor-in-Chief Cal Alabaster Jr. draws on his considerable experience in Southern politics to round up news, notes, and blatantly pasted-in press releases that readers may have otherwise missed.
THAT'S THE JOKE.
Members of the Birmingham Board of Education overnight burned down most of the system’s schools and took other acts to devastate education in the Birmingham area in a bold action aimed at sending a message to state officials who tried to tell them things.
Last week, the same board members voted to fire Superintendent Craig Witherspoon, defying orders from the Alabama Board of Education, which has taken over the system because of personnel and spending concerns.
With Witherspoon restored by week’s end thanks to state action and lawsuits, the five members who voted for his firing said that they felt something had to be done to remind the state who is really in charge of education in the Birmingham area.
“This is our money,” said School Board President Edward Maddox, as he used a flamethrower to ignite the lunchroom at George Washington Carver High School.
“We should decide how we spend it or how not to spend it,” Maddox said, lighting up a Molotov cocktail. “They’ve got no business coming here and telling us how to run our schools when the voters put us in charge.
“Us,” he said as he casually threw the Molotov cocktail into a classroom and walked away.
“Where’s the concern about atheltics [sic]?” demanded board member Tyrone Belcher, as he set up an elaborate and disturbing array of handmade explosives in P.D. Jackson-Olin High School’s gymnasium. “The state doesn’t have to sit here and listen to all these people angry with the superintendent that we invite to speak at our meetings. They don’t get the problems going on here.”
“They don’t understand our concerns over this mess,” Belcher said as he pushed a plunger in Jackson-Olin’s parking lot, igniting a fireball seen as far north as Warrior.
“The state is trying to make us do things,” said board member Virginia Volker, overturning a large canister and filling Jefferson State Community College with hundreds of deadly vipers for some reason. “That makes us mad.”
“There’s only one way to get anything done with these people — and that’s with action,” said Maddox as he and Belcher drafted blood- and feces-smeared death threats to be sent to any out-of-state employers looking to settle in the Birmingham area.
“We’ll make our mess as big as we see it, and we’ll fix it how we want to,” Belcher said, spreading some of the ashes of what’s left of the Birmingham education system on one letter.
Instead of dealing with the issues actually affecting the school system, the six board members say that at their next meeting they plan on spending three hours hearing from residents who would like Witherspoon to be fired.
That is, not just terminated from his job again, but actually lit on fire.
Hoover mom proudly overreacts to ‘Dark Knight Rises’ shootings
After hearing news of the mass shooting inside a Colorado movie theater’s midnight showing of “The Dark Knight Rises,” Hoover mother of two Molly Collins-White was ready to overreact in a silly exercise that she believed would make her children safe from freak shootings and the possibility of their committing similar violent acts.
Collins-White immediately collected “anything that looked like a cartoon with pointy ears and clown faces so the kids won’t kill anybody,” she bragged to a friend over the phone on Friday afternoon. She also admonished her two boys that believing in “anti-gun superheroes lead to gun murder” and that they are never to go to a movie theater ever again.
“And now you know what happens to people who stay up past midnight,” she scolded her confused sons.
But Collins-White is not “heartless,” she told friends and family concerned about her kneejerk reaction to a freak incident that ultimately has little to nothing to do with a particular set of fictional characters.
She said she plans on picking out “a new superhero cartoon that’s actually healthy for young boys’ minds unlike that violent and mean Batman.
“I think this Punisher cartoon sounds promising,” Collins-White told her friend over the phone. “I like the message that name sends.”
Weekend headlines from Alabama papers
The Birmingham News: “MORE EXCITING NONEVENTS FROM SEC MEDIA DAYS!”
Mobile Press-Register: “BETWEEN SEC MEDIA DAYS AND AIRBUS WE’VE LEFT GALLONS OF BIOLOGICAL MATERIAL ON THE FLOOR!”
The Huntsville Times: “NICK SABAN SAID THINGS!!!! GENE CHIZIK TOO!!! ROCKET!!!”
The Anniston Star: “Actual news”
The Daily Mountain Eagle: “Birmingham Galleria fire prompts Jasper Mall to take extra precaution by hosing down all merchandise”
This week in Alabama history
William Lowndes Yancey, the pro-slavery “fire-eater” who drafted Alabama’s ordinance of secession from the United States prior to the Civil War, died at his home in Montgomery.
Since then, Yancey’s intellectual descendants have pointed to his death and those of millions of Alabamians since then as proof that “not owning slaves is what fatal.”
Reran Tragedy is Weld’s satirical blog about politics and life in Alabama and the South. Much of what you will read here is fictionalized, except for all the parts that are unfortunately true because they are about politics and life in Alabama and the South. You can follow it on Twitter @ReranTragedy. You can reach the blog’s author at calalabaster@gmail.com.
The artist known as Cal Alabaster Jr., if that is his or her real name, may or may not also be the author of the Alabama humor blog called “King Cockfight.” If true, you may read Cal’s work there at kingcockfight.wordpress.com.
