You'll know Jena by its strange fruit

The mayor of Jena, La., is mad at John Mellencamp in the wake of the rocker's telling it like it is about his little burg's being straight out of In the Heat of the Night.

Actually, Mellencamp uses the home of the Jena Six as a stepping stone to take an unflinching look at race in America. Never mind, hizzoner is miffed, reports The Associated Press:

A video in which rapper Mos Def asked students around the country to walk out Oct. 1 to support the Jena 6 escaped comment by the town’s mayor. When John Mellencamp sang, “Jena, take your nooses down,” he took issue.

“The town of Jena has for months been mischaracterized in the media and portrayed as the epicenter of hatred, racism and a place where justice is denied,” Jena Mayor Murphy R. McMillin wrote in a statement on town letterhead faxed Friday to The Associated Press.

He said he had previously stayed quiet, hoping that the town’s courtesy to people who have visited over the past year would speak for itself. “However, the Mellencamp video is so inflammatory, so defamatory, that a line has been crossed and enough is enough.” Mellencamp could not comment because he was on a plane from California to Indiana and had not heard about McMillin’s comments, publicist Bob Merlis said late Friday.

A note from Mellencamp posted Thursday on his Web site says he is telling a story, not reporting. “The song is not written as an indictment of the people of Jena but, rather, as a condemnation of racism,” it says.

Nooses hung briefly from a big oak tree outside Jena High School a year ago, after a black freshman asked whether black students could sit under it.

IT DOESN'T MATTER, Mr. Mayor, how courteous you are to people you'd like to think well of you. What matters is how you treat your own -- how "courteous" you are to those you see no clear percentage in treating like actual human beings.

In a town where an African-American ninth-grader feels like he has to get the white principal's permission to sit under the "white tree," there's a racism problem and an oppression problem.

That hangman's nooses appeared in the tree after that request, and that those responsible weren't expelled, only exposed the preexisting gangrenous rot in Jena. Racism in Jena is the original sin -- indeed, it's America's original sin -- and every bad thing that's happened there since those nooses swung from the "white tree" are just ripples from homegrown bigots pitching a big rock into a pond called Jena, Louisiana.