In the end it doesn’t matter if we label Dylann Roof, the racist murderer in Charlestown, a terrorist or not. Without for one moment exempting him from criminal culpability, we have to own up to the fact that US society is systemically rancid with social hatred. That’s hard for white people to face so we try to tune it out so that all these murders become white noise & whites aren’t put on edge or start to question supremacy.

Media orchestrates that deceit, the US government manipulates it for war, politicians & candidates flaunt & incite it. When Obama speaks casually of bombing other peoples & when governments stand silent while thousands of brown & black people drown in the sea, they feed the social pathology. When Trump says all immigrants from Mexico are drug traffickers & rapists, he feeds the social malice. And monsters like Roof are what come out of it because they’ve been bred in a diseased society. And that’s awful hard to face squarely.

Many are posting photos of those who died in Charlestown. Tis an international phenomenon of grief that those who lose people to violence create photo montages of their loved ones. There have been hundreds of young Black kids shot over the past decades & their images are just now forming a political montage. We need to view their faces to understand the enormity of the crimes against the Black community, to silence the white noise of denial, & to begin to not just question but stand with Blacks in building their political power & in ending the tyranny of white supremacy.

Some say that’s a pipe dream. But racism as an ideology, though powerful, is only a few hundred years old. Humankind lived without it for thousands of millennia. It’s only brought human misery & justified the most odious crimes. Let ours be the generations that destroy it so we can live as brothers & sisters.

Perhaps it was hasty to suggest Donald Trump brought presidential politics to new lows. Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum also have a way with words that we haven’t seen since George W. Bush.

Malapropisms are the misuse of words with unintentional hilarity & Bush was a master at that, His father was a completely inarticulate boob, so wretched with language the NY Times should have stopped publishing presidential press conferences word-for word. Their problem wasn’t just malaprops but a complete lack of cognitive function in another case of privilege makes you stupid. The dysfunction was so severe a new word was invented to accommodate it: Bushism, which appears in the dictionary as GWB’s “unconventional use of language.”

The current GOP candidates aren’t flattering GHWB or GWB by comparison but are forging new cognitive & linguistic inroads into dysfunction with the notable inclusion of Huckabee’s sexual preoccupations.

They’re a deplorable lot & whilst we have to endure them we ought at least be able to have a little fun at their expense.

The police chief in Charlestown, South Caroline said “There’s no doubt in my mind it’s a hate crime,” after a white guy shot & killed nine people in a predominantly Black church. But Fox news found a Black minister in another state to claim it was part of “a rising hostility against Christianity” because of their Biblical views & not a racist crime.

He did call for armed self-defense which is something the Black community is likely debating because they have a right to defend themselves against violence & armed assault. But it is problematic because it would invite police & military intervention against the Black community, & not in its defense.

Michelle Obama is at Milan Expo 2015 in Italy to talk about her Let’s Move initiative to combat childhood obesity. And here the rest of us thought millions of kids starving, including in the US, was the paramount issue. Obese isn’t what you get from eating too much food but from eating poor people’s food that fills you up when your family hasn’t got money for real meals.

She ought to get back here & figure out how to feed the thousands of poor kids prowling dumpsters for food because the school free lunch programs have ended for the summer.

Sometimes a meme is worth a thousand tracts about essentialism & the new phenomenon called transracialism. It makes things real again.