This wasn’t a parody

The Onion takes great pleasure in offering parodies of news events.

The link attached here talks about a black man who supports flying the Confederate flag — and who has just tripled his media appearance rates to tell  his story.

http://www.theonion.com/article/black-man-support-confederate-flag-triples-his-med-50727

It’s a hilarious send-up of a current news story.

However, it brings to mind a woman I met many years ago while covering a governor’s race in Louisiana. If only she had been pulling my leg at the time. She wasn’t.

The year was 1991. I was working in Beaumont, in the southeastern corner of Texas, about 25 miles from the Louisiana border. The Beaumont Enterprise was covering “regional news” back then, and still sold newspapers all the way to Lake Charles, La. I thought I could get an interesting commentary out of the governor’s race in the state next door, so I ventured across the Sabine River and went to Vinton, La., where voters were casting ballots.

The two candidates were the Democrat, former Gov. Edwin Edwards and the Republican, David Duke — yes, that David Duke, the Ku Klux Klansman.

I went to a polling place and talked to voters walking away. I approached a middle-aged African-American woman and asked her about the race — expecting fully to get the kind of response I’d heard from other African-Americans about a contest between a colorful former governor and the intensely controversial opponent, Duke.

What I got damn near bowled me over.

The woman said she voted for Duke!

The KKK stuff didn’t bother her, she said. His white supremacist views weren’t the deal-breaker, she explained.

Why did you vote for him? I asked. It was his stand on welfare, she said.

I truly thought she was kidding. I pressed her some more about her political leanings and she insisted that she was sincere. David Duke was her man because he wanted to get people off welfare, that she was tired of paying for other people’s food and housing. If they really wanted to work, she said, they could find a job.

Wow! Who knew?

Looking back on 24 years on that amazing encounter, I can read The Onion parody and wonder: Is it really a joke?

Hmmm. Yeah. It is.