A Mighty Wind

North Carolina has never been first in anything, except maybe as the source of more lung cancer than anywhere. The Wright Brothers, with characteristic sense, investigated and learned where they would find the best winds for flying their gliders. 

It was North Carolina.

When the winds weren't needed the Wrights went back to Dayton and stayed. Now North Carolina is senselessly pioneering repression and becoming a haven for bigots, an Afghanistan for the NASCAR brand of racist honkey. Recall Jesse Helms.

For decades sensible people have discounted guys like Helms as unrepresentative of anything, a tenacious toe fungus on a political foot. We expected this of Alabama and Mississippi and two or three other states comprising the nation's idiot uncle. 

But North Carolina? What many citizens don't see is the lowest-common-denominator thing in operation, that the idiot uncle is running everything and has been, the weakest link and missing link that gets its way because it must be cared for.

Actually, the idiot uncle, the neo-Confederate South, is our North Korea.

The region is retrenching as a racist substate, incapable of seeing to itself and its citizens. It's criminally deranged, with a history of leeching off other entities, racial or geographic. Let's let the uncle fester and fend. Well, now we'll have to pry the sucker off. 

It's the Republican political linchpin, the source of their evil power, with political nukes and terrorist tendencies. And, North Carolina, please quit pathetically claiming to be first in anything. You're now a disgrace: first, perhaps, only in malfeasance.