Everybody Likes A Pony

The Kitsap Business Journal launches what was undoubtedly its maiden voyage into the waters of nationwide controversy, and ends up at the bottom of Puget Sound. No sooner had John Gilmore alerted us to the now-famous "Pony In Slavery" column by KBP columnist Adele Fergusen than the column vanished full fathom five. (You can see the 404 here.) Whether that was due to the abuse and vituperation the column was receiving, Anansi only knows, but in any event the gesture was in vain: Fergusen's column can be found in its entirety here.

Like all things whose value derives mainly from five minutes of inaccessability, the Pony In Slavery column seemed like kind of a letdown when I found it. The premise, taking off from Ronald Reagan's joke about the kid looking for the pony in a pile of shit, is that blacks refuse to admit that slavery was a really a pony—a ticket that brought them from their own Kong-worshipping lands to the U.S.A. Or maybe slavery was the pile of shit and the U.S.A. is the pony. Or else the pony is Ronald Reagan and somebody dropped the ticket in a pile of shit, thereby getting kicked off the bus for violating the "Do not handle this ticket in an unsanitary manner" warning clearly printed on all bus tickets. In any event, it struck me as incredibly stupid and ill-conceived, but nothing beyond the insaniac stylings commonly found in our nation's local weeklies, where fossilized cranks are always churning out rambling columns about their own weird fixations. (That mad variety helps make this one of the two or three greatest countries between Canada and Mexico.) But then I was assuming from Fergusen's reference to her "black brothers and sisters" that she was a Sister, or maybe a plant designed to discredit GOP ladies who lunch. But it turns out she's a real columnist with a headshot that looks like one of those Onion columnist photos.