For fictional purposes, the place was called “Rock Ridge” and the setting was put at 137 years ago somewhere in the American West.
But nowadays, how can there be doubt that Hollywood's historic comedy, Blazing Saddles, was actually based on Orange County–the white, snobby, upper-middle-class southern suburb of Los Angeles?
The inauguration of America's first black president in 2009 inspired an elected, white Republican official here to joke that the White House would now be surrounded by watermelons.
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In the most recent racial attack on President Barack Obama, another
white, Republican, elected official sent an email this month to fellow
conservatives that depicted Obama and his parents as chimpanzees,
accompanied by the statement “Now we know why no birth certificate.”
You
see, black people–even if they rise to the most powerful, elected
office on the planet–are really still stupid, un-American monkeys.
Funny, right?
Funny, perhaps, if you didn't know that history is repeating itself. In Blazing Saddles–a
1974 comedy–a black man is named sheriff of Rock Ridge by the state's
governor, and without ever seeing him in person, the townfolk are
elated a brave hero is coming to save them from all the mistakes that
have them on the verge of annihilation.
But they are elated only for as long as they don't know the color of their hero's skin.
Here, captured in Youtube glory, this scene seems to capture Orange County conservatives in 2011:
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.