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Jeff Whitten: Naked like the day you was born
editor's notes

From the rear lines of the pandemic, part 7 or 11 (I’ve lost count):

The world seems to have gone so full bore crazy these days I’m tempted to show up naked at a school board meeting just to see if anybody notices I’m not wearing any clothes.

Given a lot of school officials at school board meetings have advanced degrees the odds are in my favor somebody might get wise in one direction or the other.

“Hey, isn’t that that little fat editor guy?,” someone might ask.

“Yep, that’s that little fat editor guy,” someone else might say, or might not. “I can’t tell for sure since he’s wearing one of them COVID-19 masks.”

“Well he needs to wear it somewhere else,” another one might say, if they happen to notice that’s all I’m wearing.

“Somewhere else” in this case could mean physically, as in, somewhere else on my remarkably used-car-like physique.

Or, it could mean geographically, like somewhere else in Bryan County, such as in a ditch on the side of Highway 17 just this side of King’s Landing, where if the stars are aligned just right a giant alligator could get me, and good riddance too.

Or it could mean both.

But I digress. We’re not savages here.

“Hey,” one school board member might say if I wasn’t in that ditch and instead standing over by the snack table. “He’s as naked as the day he was born, but only if he was born wearing a mask.”

And we would have a good fake laugh and then they’d get down to using big words to befuddle me. Words like “differentiated instruction,” and “instructional scaffolding,” and “millage rate increase.”

In reality, of course, if I went naked to a school board meeting I would likely get arrested and given a free ride to Georgia Regional, where they might beat me with a garden hose and then ask me whether I was a Republican or a Democrat, since that seems to matter a lot these days.

Democrats, I’ve learned, like the color blue. Republicans, on the other hand, like the color red.

Red State, Blue State.

Me State, You State.

And that’s about it, except Republicans like the president and the Democrats hate him so much they spend every waking moment seething and plotting revenge.

This is because before the current president was elected the shoe was on the other foot and the Democrats loved the president while the Republicans hated him so much they wandered around seething and plotting revenge.

It’s how politics works nowadays. If you ain’t in, you’re out. And if you’re out, you want back in. It pays better than real work.

And that’s about that, except I also learned there are more Republicans in South Bryan than there are grains of sand on Tybee Island, and sometimes it seemed half of them just ran for sheriff, but the Democrats are catching up and half of them are running for Congress.

Of course, they’re all usually clothed, though I wonder whether that’s good policy.

I suspect one thing we’d get from naked leaders is less bombastic leaders, since they’d be worried more about whether they tweezered those spots in need of a good tweezering than they would about whether the president said they ate used cat litter.

On the flip side, I’m not sure anybody wants to see a naked U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter telling the Richmond Hill Rotary Club everything will be OK once President Donald Trump stomps the running lights out of Joe Biden and the rest of those pesky socialist Marxist lunatics who want to bankrupt the country and get all your guns and give them to criminals who’ll come ruin your lawn.

On the flip side of the flip side, a naked Rep. Carter addressing a naked Richmond Hill Rotary Club meeting might be interesting, if it was legal, which it probably is, even for Republicans. After all, I’m an editor and have a degree somewhere, and I’ve never read that it was illegal to hold a Rotary Club meeting naked.

You’d think they would have brought it up before now if it was.

And, of course, being naked is the perfect way for politicians to show they’re not in anybody’s pockets, if you know what I mean. Figuratively, anyhow.

“As you can see,” I can see a congressional candidate saying while the cameras roll. “I’m laying it all on the table. Despite what my opponents say, I’ve nothing to hide.”

Be safe out there.

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