In Celebration of Shooting Niggers

It's pretty clear that America's long love affair with shooting and otherwise killing and abusing black people has taken on new life. Call it a pastime. On the way somewhere today I saw two pickup trucks flying large rebel flags in celebration of the murders of those black people in Charleston.

This is a criminal culture with a deep streak of defensiveness. For decades Americans have made excuses for their backward, white brethren in Dixie when they couldn't be kept out of sight and dragged their knuckles around the yard, but they're altogether off the compound now and causing trouble.

And behaving more like apes and aborigines than any of their Darwin-loving fellow countrymen. Some years ago Hendrik Hertzberg wrote something fantasizing about the secession of Texas and all the things America could do without that ball and chain. It was too wonderful for words.

Sane and rational and humane, with plenty of PBS. Is it really too much to hope for? Oh, those rebel flags, they haunt us. We kill black people in denial of our destiny, our doom, because they are us, the better part of us, the part that is vulnerable and enduring and free. We, the white people, are in chains.