"Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton

Down where they ain't fond of votin'.

Chip away. Chip away. Chip away at your rights."

"Dixie" as rewritten by a heretic.

Texas, the Lone Voting Booth State, is twisting itself into very small knots trying to pass some legislation aimed at preventing nonexistent voter fraud by outlawing mail-in voting, drive-thru voting, ballot boxes and voting by Blacks, the last being the most desired outcome.

And you can't blame the Texas legislators. For a while there, they were walkin' in high cotton, and they had a pretty good idea of who was supposed to pick the cotton, by hand, for free, while singing spirituals.

Donald Trump was president back in the old times that are not forgotten, and after long decades of oppression at the hands of educated Christians, it was finally safe to be a bigot again. The long dark night of white people was over. We had overcome.

Trouble was that, despite Trump hugging the flag in public, the damn Blacks, the gays and some of the women were puzzlingly unwilling to participate in their own disenfranchisement. Told to go back to the cotton field, the closet and the kitchen, they refused to accept the gift of inferiority.

It would have been fine if all they did was get mad and riot, but they voted, and they elected each other, and they elected people who didn't hate them for who they are. Pretty soon, Trump found himself retiring to Florida, where he rants like Al Capone dying of untreated syphilis not too far from where Trump now lives.

Well, that couldn't be allowed to happen again, or the United States would descend into the chaos of equality and fairness.

The trouble for legislators is that it's not nearly as easy to write discriminatory voting laws as it used to be back in the days of the whip and the banjo.

You used to be able to just write a law that flat-out said Black people or women couldn't vote, and you could pass any law doing anything to gay people. In fact, until very recently, gay people existed only as fodder for jokes and as a target for Bible and bigotry-inspired legislation.

Nowadays, if you want to write a voting law that keeps, ahem, certain people from voting, you have to do it, as Naughty by Nature once rapped, "ahh ... sorta properly."

No one is going to stand up on the sawdust-strewn floor of the Texas Legislature and say they want to keep Black people from voting. That's the kind of thing you say quietly in the bar at the country club after looking over both shoulders to make sure none of the waiters are around.

Since the outright, blazin' guns appeal to bigotry is out of the question, you have to do it ah ... sorta properly.

Fewer ballot boxes, further apart. It won't hurt anybody to have to take a couple buses. Get rid of that mail-in voting, too. Democracy oughta be hard. You want the committed voter who will stand in line for hours to vote. You don't want people to just roll out of bed and vote.

The goal in Texas and a number of other states is to get things sharpened down to a fine point so that in every state you have maybe 1,000 straight, white, Christian men who can vote. By having that small of a number, you guarantee there will be no voter fraud since maybe two people will vote in every precinct, and the poll workers will know them by their first names.

"Well, hello, John," the poll worker says to the distinguished older gent. "Here's your Republican ballot. Have you been working out?"

"Why, yes, I have," the voter says. "Thanks for noticing. But how did you know it was me under this white hood?"

"I knew by your eyes," the jolly poll worker says.

You can always tell by the eyes, and in the Texas Legislature, you can also tell by the "ayes."

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Devil's Elbow: Dancing in the Ashes of America." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle and iBooks.

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Photo credit: 12019 at Pixabay