Showing posts with label Virginia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Virginia. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 12, 2019

The unshakable burden of growing up fascist


I have come to explain my native region of the country as born fascist. Fascist from its settlement by the white man -- fascist before we knew what fascism was.

The American South is fascist, was fascist and always has been fascist. Adolf Hitler and his German Nazis carefully studied the South as a blueprint for the kind of society they wanted to build at home -- and violently impose upon the world.

The evidence of this lies in the headlines of your daily newspaper today . . . and it was ever present in the headlines of yesteryear's daily newspapers, too. The articles here both were on the front page of the Morning World-Herald right here in Omaha, Tuesday, Feb. 3, 1948.

The police commissioner using his police powers to determine what records could and couldn't be sold in stores or played on jukeboxes was in Memphis. James O. Eastland -- the U.S. senator who went out of his way to make sure reporters knew he had referred to an NAACP official with a vile racial slur -- represented Mississippi, right next door to Tennessee.

Eastland served until 1978. Because Mississippi.

Any white Southerner of a certain age -- namely my age -- has to live in fear, to some degree, in the wake of the "woke" attempts at purging all racial transgressors from public life, regardless of the offense or whether it occurred decades ago. On one hand, it is inexcusable that Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam dressed up in blackface as a 20-something. It ain't good that Virginia attorney general Mark Herring browned up his face as a 19-year-old college freshman to impersonate one of his favorite rappers.

Northam is 59 now; Herring is 57. I am 57 -- almost 58.

On the one hand, this stuff is bad. Oughtn't have happened. Even in the 1980s, white Southerners should have known this stuff was unacceptable.

On the other hand . . . what the hell do people expect? How, in the name of basic sentience and a basic knowledge of American history, is anyone surprised?

And when, exactly, did Americans lose any belief in the tenets of grace, forgiveness and redemption? When did we all decide that it was impossible for people to change, to grow?

Listen, those of us born during the tail end of Jim Crow -- many of us raised by thoroughly racist parents within thoroughly racist families in a pervasively racist Southern society and culture -- too often didn't know what we didn't know. We all had to deal with the burden of our upbringing.

You have to understand the ubiquity of an extremely warped culture, and the Jim Crow and post-Jim Crow South was an extremely warped culture. After World War II, Germans of a certain age were allowed to redeem themselves once the Nazi regime had been relegated to several awful chapters of a world history textbook. Apparently, Southerners such as Northam and Herring in the commonwealth will not be granted that opportunity -- by their own countrymen, no less.


OBVIOUSLY, Northam botched his opportunity to explain himself and shine a light on what was, and to a large degree still is, a sick and racist culture. There probably will not now be a fruitful national dialogue about the role of culture -- particularly racist cultures -- in forming civil society and what it means to have been formed by a deviant society.

Neither will we have a productive national discussion about how we -- each of us -- might shed the unbearable burden of our upbringing. In this case, our very Southern upbringing.

Let me say it again: The American South, basically, was Nazi before the Nazis were Nazi. And that's the air that was the burden of Southern whites' upbringing. We didn't know anything else.

In the case of this Southern white boy who came into the world in the Louisiana of 1961, my first inkling that my world might be seriously f***ed up was network television. Specifically, Julia and Room 222. I cannot tell you how revolutionary it was to see black folk who were anything but the stereotypical "n*****s" we had been carefully taught to see and believe in.

There's a word to describe the upbringing of lots of Southern kids just like me. That would be "brainwashing." It started at birth and primarily was administered by parents who themselves had been brainwashed since birth.

Not to put too fine a point on it, network television was we Southerners' very own version of Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty or the Voice of America. Many of our parents, kinfolk and the other adults surrounding us did not see it that way. In their vision, ABC, NBC and CBS were more like a bunch of "agitators," a bunch of "n***** lovers" or a "bunch of goddamn commerniss."

This can't be overstated. It just can't. Oh . . . I was born and raised in Baton Rouge. I went to public schools. That means, for my grade level, that I went to de jure segregated schools until fourth grade in 1970.

And when my school was "integrated" -- and in 1970 "neighborhood schools" was a federal-court desegregation tool in Baton Rouge -- my school had two black kids . . . whose family had lived in the neighborhood before there was a neighborhood. One, Janice, was in my class.

She was my friend, and we played together at recess. A teacher told me I shouldn't do that -- it didn't look right to be playing with "a colored girl." To her credit, my racist mother (rather inexplicably, given "racist") called the NAACP to complain about that one.

Janice was treated horribly across the board. Seeing that was another brick knocked out of the wall. A major reinforcement to the counternarrative coming from Radio Free Dixie -- a.k.a., ABC, NBC and CBS.

So, on one level, I'm reluctant to condemn Ralph Northam, as bad as it all is. I was guilty of something worse than blackface when I was just 4 years old. But we Southerners just have to quit lying to ourselves and everybody else. We have to look -- hard -- at who we were . . . and are.

And we, at long last, have to be accountable.

We Southerners, in addition to a racism/fascism problem, have had a sincerity problem for a long damn time now.

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

The look of hate is in our eyes


This is what white privilege looks like.

In GQ magazine, documentarian C. J. Hunt says the "video of this part-time Nazi, this junior secessionist, is a perfect portrait of the very white privilege the so-called 'alt-right' decries as liberal fiction."

I cannot disagree. When you're a little chickenshit Nazi who gets separated from his volk in a big, bad race riot, gets chased, then caught by a bunch of anti-fascist counterdemonstrators but gets to walk away alive -- walk away unmolested in any way except for the debasement he has visited upon himself -- because he can strip off his "uniform" and beg for mercy, saying he's not a real white supremacist . . . that's some serious white privilege.

It also is proof positive that Donald Trump's "alt-left" holds all kinds of moral high ground over the "very fine" Nazis our catastrophe-in-chief assures us he knows all about. The Nazis, you see -- the ones who are so tough en masse but turn into sniveling little cowards when alone and cornered -- would not have had mercy on someone who couldn't "pass" by taking off a white polo shirt.

Don't believe me, watch this.
 

I AM someone who thinks, as a rule, "identity politics" is unhelpful in holding this diverse and troubled country together. I also think it's a losing political proposition unless, of course, you are someone as evil and as shameless as Donald Trump, who managed to identify enough of the dispossessed,  the angrily conservative, the hypocritically religious and the blatantly white and fascist to cobble together a barely winning coalition.

But I also say this as a middle-aged white Southerner who's lived in the Midwest for more than half my life. The parts of my identity that I can't strip off like a polo shirt are not likely to get me killed.

Not if I stumble across a Nazi rally, and not if I get pulled over by an Omaha cop.


"White privilege isn’t just an easy bank loan or the cumulative effects of discriminatory housing policy," Hunt, the documentary filmmaker, said in his GQ article.
It's also the privilege to disappear. The privilege to terrorize a community and return to your regular life with the ease of peeling off a polo shirt. The privilege to come to someone else’s town, invoke the symbols and slogans used to terrorize Jews, African-Americans, and countless other races in history’s darkest chapters, and pretend it’s simply your way of showing ethnic pride. It’s the privilege to engage in terror “for fun,” and the privilege to walk away. For most of my life, I've thought of racism as the vestiges of a dying generation. It's far more terrifying to behold a sea of young people for whom white supremacy is just a rec-league sport.
YOU DON'T have to surrender to the relative tribalism of identity politics to admit what is as plain as day, yet as invisible as mountain air to your average white Trump voter: If people aren't looking at you funny . . . or following you around as you shop for fear you'll steal something . . . or blowing your brains out during a traffic stop . . . or trying to make it as difficult as possible for you to vote . . . or assuming that anything you've ever achieved had to be at their expense . . . or beating the crap out of you in a parking garage because of the color of your skin, you're probably not endangered, threatened or have that much cause to feel aggrieved.

And when you see those things actually happening to folks of color, they probably are . . . and have cause to. Be aggrieved, that is. 

To recognize the bleeding obvious today, all one needs is just a bit of empathy, a quality that also happens to be in exceedingly short supply and, when acquired, usually is applied highly selectively.

The standard American conceit is that we're better than this. Obviously, we're not. Maybe we've backslidden in recent years; maybe we never were.

Alton Sterling protest, 2016 / Reuters
WHAT KEEPS me up every night is that I see this country becoming more and more like the Louisiana I knew as a child and a teenager. That's not a good thing. That's a racist, hateful thing.

Surely, it's one of two things -- that we have profoundly regressed as a people, or that we've dropped a societal façade so convincing that it caused us to become somnambulant.

To the great detriment of my mental health, I sometimes read the comments on Facebook pages for various Louisiana media outlets, generally on stories having to do with race or Confederate statues . . . or protests against Trump. If someone, like myself, is perverse enough to read that crap, it's reasonable he's going to be alarmed. It's bad out there . . . or on there, as the case may be -- even accounting for the propensity of nuts and those full of resentment to number among the most constant commenters.

On a Baton Rouge TV station's Facebook post about Monday's protest in Durham, N.C., where leftist protesters tore down a Confederate memorial, there were at least three "kill them all" comments, several more calling them "animals" (contemporary Southern replacement for the N-word), hundreds of demands to lock them all up, several commenters eager for the commencement of civil hostilities . . . and at least one fellow as sure as his 1861 ancestors that the filthy lib'ruls would surrender as soon as the first shot was fired.

Because that's exactly what happened after Fort Sumter, right?

MY SLEEPLESS NIGHTS bring me to another rumination about identity and "white privilege."


We all know what Trump did Saturday. What he reluctantly -- and unconvincingly -- said Monday. How the Trump Train came off the tracks on Tuesday and the president angrily threw his true colors in the face of the assembled White House press corps, revealing himself to be a Nazi-sympathizer. (Really, there's just no other way to put it.)

The coastal media elites seem to think that's the end of him, then.

New Orleans, 1960
Those of us still enough in touch with "flyover country," particularly the Deep South, know better. In the American South, as objectively awful as Trump's words are -- and as awful as he is -- if the 2020 presidential election were tomorrow, he'd probably win in a cakewalk. It would be reasonable for you to ask, at this juncture, "What the f***?"

The eff is pretty much this: Large swaths of the United States are now fully fascist in every way but name. And the Deep South always has been.


When I was growing up, having been born toward the end of Jim Crow (1961) and having lived nowhere else but Baton Rouge until early 1983, I didn't realize that, because I knew nothing else. None of us did -- at least none of us white folk.

I went to legally segregated public schools until 1970. Yes, 1970. In 1970, neighborhood schools was a desegregation plan. White people still lost their shit. Very Trumpian, actually.


"Degenerate Music" exhibit catalog
Between something like 1963 and 1970, desegregation was a "freedom of choice" plan for blacks to go to all-white schools in their attendance district, starting with 12th grade and adding a grade to the plan every year. For an elementary kid like I was, the biggest threat one's parent could make against your misbehaving self would be to "send you to the nigger school."

I imagine parents are still making that threat today -- education is still that segregated there. Only now, starting when the feds ordered busing in 1981, whites have almost totally abandoned the public schools; they're 90 percent nonwhite. When I graduated in 1979, they were roughly 67 percent white.

Likewise, Baton Rouge itself has been largely abandoned by whites. A city that was more than 60 percent white in the early '80s now is majority minority. What was a unified parish (county) school district has turned into four school districts, as suburban cities broke away and formed their own. Unincorporated suburbs in the southern part of East Baton Rouge Parish want to incorporate as a new city so they can form a new (mostly white) school district. This, of course, would gut Baton Rouge's tax base. A couple of years ago, St. George activists fell short after a terrible and bitter battle that got worldwide news coverage.


Yet, they will not go away. The battle likely will resume as soon as electoral law allows.

Someone could argue that, in parts of the United States, we're fighting a civil war right now, just without the shooting (so far).

IN MY HOMETOWN,  there is white privilege. It is deeply institutionalized in law and in custom. Like a white polo shirt, my people -- white Southern people -- could take it off. But they will not. Is that, broadly defined, not the heart of fascism?

Was not the antebellum South, with its brutality, master-race theorizing and chattel slavery, not a spiritual progenitor of Nazism? Did not the postwar Jim Crow South, -- that of ritualized brutality, culturally internalized racist beliefs, de jure segregation and government-enforced second-class citizenship for blacks -- provide a legal blueprint, if not the legal blueprint, for Nazi Germany's Nuremberg Laws of 1935?

That's exactly what a Yale law professor argues.

From the introduction to James Q. Whitman's book, Hitler's American Model:

Moreover, the ironic truth is that when Nazis rejected the American example, it was sometimes because they thought that American practices were overly harsh: for Nazis of the early 1930s, even radical ones, American race law sometimes looked too racist.
PRIVILEGE. Fascism by the name "Americanism" -- or "Southern heritage" . . . or any other damn thing but what it was. That's the all-American world in which I was reared, and which exists even today, in pockets, from sea to shining sea, and almost unbroken from Virginia to Texas.

Yet we are shocked, shocked there are Nazis among us. That white supremacy once again is ascendant.

Yet we wonder how the hell an amoral, racist -- and dangerous -- buffoon like Donald John Trump became the 45th president of the United States.


To me, the issue in this country isn't whether the United States will go fascist; the issue is whether a) the South ever will QUIT being fascist, or b) the rest of the country will become fascist, just like the former Confederate states.

The answer to that question, only God, through His tears, can see.

Monday, August 14, 2017

Land of the sucker, home of the coward


You know about Charlottesville. You know what President Trump said (or, rather, didn't say) about Charlottesville.

You probably have heard some Trump-addled right-wing ditwad blame the neo-Nazi riot in the Virginia college town on former President Barack Obama, or Black Lives Matter . . . or on any damned thing apart from the neo-Nazis and their chief enabler and encourager, Donald Trump.


You even might have heard some Trump-loving American fascists -- and make no mistake, to love Donald Trump and his agenda is to be an American fascist -- blame Heather Heyer, 32, for her own death in an act of neo-Nazi domestic terrorism. I have heard just that. Then again, I am originally from the fascist stronghold of Baton Rouge, La., and sometimes read the comments on local news stories there.  (I need to quit doing that.)

Heather Heyer
As the demented Nazi-apologist argument (such as it is) goes, Heyer is to blame for her own demise . . . because she was there. And for being a hateful "libtard" who had the gall to protest against white-supremacists who, after all, were exercising their First Amendment rights.

In the words of the American troll's favorite American antihero, "BAD!" Or was it "SAD!" ? I forget.


THIS BRINGS me to something Al Jazeera English dug from the depths of YouTube. I hesitate to bring Al Jazeera into this, because someone sees "Al Jazeera," thinks "MUSLIN TERRORISS!!!" and what's left of their brain freezes up. Anyway. . . .

What the cable-news outlet found and posted to social media was a clip from the 1947 reissue of Don't Be a Sucker, a 1943 anti-fascist propaganda film produced by the U.S. War Department. Cliff's Notes version: The film opens with a montage of all the ways one can be suckered, segues into a fascist stump speaker on the courthouse square in Anytown, U.S.A., then outlines the rise and fall (and toll) of Nazi rule in Germany.

The clip going around Facebook, et al, was supposed to be a history-based argument on the evils of fascism and white supremacy. And that it indeed is. But if you hunt down Don't Be a Sucker on the Internet -- a high-quality version is downloadable from the Internet Archive -- and watch the whole thing, much more becomes clear. Clear as someone caught in the high-wattage beam of a concentration-camp spotlight.


Cleaned-up a bit for 21st-century consumption, the fascist agitator's spiel in the public square is a remarkable facsimile of a Donald Trump campaign speech. The National Socialists' tactics to divide and conquer German society resemble something as contemporary, and Trumpian, as today's headlines. And our divided, faltering American society today is ripe for the conquering.



DONALD TRUMP knew that two years ago. American Nazis and other assorted white supremacists know it today. It is no accident that many of the racist rabble on parade in Virginia were chanting "Heil, Trump!" as they gave their stiff-armed Nazi salutes.

What the government of the United States warned its citizens about more than 70 years ago now is running the United States government. American voters who damn well ought to have known better -- been better -- put fascism in that high position.


Think about that, if you can stomach it.

Then think about what the hell you're going to do about it.

Friday, August 28, 2015

Impervious to the horror here in the heart of darkness


The Daily News slapped New York readers in the face Thursday. It slapped them in the face with a still sequence from a snuff video.

I think I know why the editors did that, and I won't outright condemn them for it because the benefit of the doubt says their motives were pure. The benefit of the doubt says  someone who thought that posting images from a snuff film made by a deranged terrorist -- a terrorist in the purest sense of the word -- would boost street sales is a terrible businessman, either that or someone who's calculated that America has reached some sort of psychopathic critical mass.

I don't know. Maybe it has.


I can understand -- maybe -- someone's curiosity getting the better of them and their watching the video. Once. Not a noble curiosity, but a human one nevertheless -- curiosity, after all, is what led Eve to the Tree of Life and a fatal taste of the forbidden fruit.

Alison Parker and Adam Ward
But gazing -- on the subway, at your office desk or over at the Daily News on your living room coffee table -- at the moment a young television reporter from Roanoke, Va., recoiled in terror as a devil with a handgun sent her to God, that is not something a normal person can stand for more than a moment. If that. Even a fleeting glance cannot be unseen.

Merely seeing the aftermath of such evil, such uncut horror, is why so many cops and paramedics end up messed up. Images like the last in the sequence the tabloid put on its front page, here for God and everybody to behold, are the pictures that combat veterans cannot get out of their minds. The moments of death that come to them in their dreams, cause them to awaken screaming in the night and, for some, cause them to blot out the terrible images with a bullet to the brain.

BUT THERE it is on the front page of the Daily News, the moment that gunshots cut down WDBJ reporter Alison Parker, 24. The moment she realized she was going to die. The moment before the gunman killed television photojournalist Adam Ward, 27, and shot a regional chamber of commerce director, Vicki Gardner, who survived.

To look into Alison Parker's eyes is to know her horror.

My hope is that the Daily News editors' intent was to force Americans to realize that the sudden horror that swept over Alison Parker as a fusillade from a Glock semiautomatic pistol began to tear into her body is, in fact, the unremitting horror of a gun-crazy -- no, an increasingly crazy crazy -- nation. An ongoing, largely preventable horror.

My conviction is that, if my hope is well placed, the Daily News editors are deeply naive. You can't argue with crazy people and bought-off politicians, and Americans today are stark, raving mad while their elected representatives, many of them, are wholly owned subsidiaries of the National Rifle Association.

I AM equally convicted that you could ambush seven out of 10 Americans and shoot them in the ass every single day for a year, then on the 366th morning, they would change the dressing on their hamburger buttocks and vow that if they had had an Uzi and eyes in the back of their heads, you never would have gotten the first shot off, you son of a bitch. Americans were not horrified by Columbine enough to insist that the Second Amendment was not drafted so that every citizen could amass an arsenal exceeding that of some small African nations.

Americans were not frightened enough by Virginia Tech to tighten up this country's firearm free-for-all one bit. Ditto for Aurora.

Sandy Hook upset folks a little bit, but it wasn't anything that the NRA and more The Bachelor and Dancing With the Stars couldn't nip in the bud.

By the time a fledgling neo-Confederate massacred nine praying African-Americans in a Charleston, S.C., church, an angry right-wing nut shot up a movie theater in Louisiana and a disgruntled ex-reporter gunned down his former colleagues in Virginia, we had come to the conclusion that the aftermath of yet another American gun massacre was an inappropriate time to talk about preventing yet more American gun massacres.

Just because we've become a nation of gun-worshiping lunatics doesn't mean we have to be indecorous. That is something best left to Donald Trump and late-night infomercials for herbal male-enhancement pills.

After all, this is America. The only thing we love as much as a big iron on our hip is a big iron in our pants. Fretting over the mounting death toll just distracts us from the important things in life . . . down here in the abyss.

And force-feeding deadly, intimate and graphic things we've no right to gawk at will not, at long last, cause those who live in this heart of darkness to see the light. If you ask me, The Horror is us.


* * *
 

POSTSCRIPT: I watched the video, alas, because I wanted to get my facts and my chronology straight. As I write, it is either very late or very early -- take your pick -- and I fear sleep, for fear of what I'll dream. God help us all.

Monday, October 29, 2012

Sandy has a vowel movement


Now, does the extratropical weather system formerly known as Sandy -- or, perhaps, Sndy -- hate vowels, or just hate Gannett?

If it's the latter, she'll have to get in line with lots of employees . . . and former ones.

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Ready for the end of the world


Summer had given way to fall in October 1962, and WAVA radio in Arlington, Va., rolled out its plan for dealing with The End of Everything.

In the Oct. 15 edition of Broadcasting magazine, the station's owner outlines how he and his staff will deal with a nuclear attack on the United States until everything got back to normal. In 1962, wild optimism and massive denial was as good a game plan as anything, particularly for WAVA owner Arthur W. Arundel.

"The announcer on duty will remain at his post," the Broadcasting article went, explaining that "all other employees are excused to follow individual or family civil defense plans and to report back to the station after the attack is over and there is no danger of radioactive fallout.

"Payday will be Friday as usual," Mr. Arundel states.

Halfway through October 1962, Arundel had no idea how close he would be in mere days to implementing WAVA's not-so-doomsday plan. On Oct. 16, the Cuban Missile Crisis began. And on Oct. 22, President Kennedy went on national television to give Americans the fright of their lives.

Don't you know? It's the end of the world. Payday's on Friday.



Thursday, July 05, 2012

Awesomest forecast ever. . . .


Unfortunately, it'll be one of the last we ever get.


Still, a final, apocalyptic tip o' the tinfoil hat to former Richmond, Va., TV weather guesser Aaron Justus for this joke weathercast he did last year before leaving
WTVR for a more satisfying career as a brewer in San Diego.

But here's what you need to know about this viral video. Almost everyone reported it wrong.

The Huffington Post got the story wrong, reporting Monday afternoon that Justus was still at Channel 6, and that Richmond viewers actually saw the spoof before it became a YouTube sensation.

THEN, among others, The Boston Globe came upon the reportile dysfunction and ran with it online the next morning, and then Mediaite, and then Fox 4 in Kansas City, and then WMAR television in Baltimore, and on and on it went.

All this despite
The Richmond Times having gotten the story straight Monday, as did The Hollywood Reporter, and then TV Spy the next day.

As newspapers die left and right of natural causes -- or expeditiously at the hand of newly-minted grads from the Kevorkian School of Business -- this is the media landscape we're going to be left with, as ink-stained wretches get replaced by 20-somethings with a daily web-post quota to fill.

New Orleans must be feeling so very optimistic about its future right now. And Louisiana's famously scumilicious politicians must be pissing themselves with the excitement of possibility.

Thursday, April 28, 2011

Unction Junction, what's your function?

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy


The Good Book says there is a time for everything:

"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. . . ."

When Rachel Maddow was laying into Birther Nation, a doctor in Tuscaloosa, Ala., rightly had other things on his mind.

Dr. David Hinson was working at the hospital when the tornado hit. He and his wife had to walk several blocks to get to their house, which was destroyed. Several houses down, he helped pull three students from the rubble. One was dead and two were badly injured. He and others used pieces of debris as makeshift stretchers to carry them to an ambulance.

"We just did the best we could to get them out and get them stabilized and get them to help," he said. "I don't know what happened to them."

WHEN the Rachel Maddow Show took to the air Wednesday night, scenes like this were playing out all over Alabama and Mississippi. They would be playing out shortly in Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky.

None of this registers, however, in a special place where politicos and ideologues can rage against the machine unmolested by real life or real people. I call it Unction Junction.

Yes, we need to speak out against the birthers, not that anyone's mind will be changed at this point. But "there is a season and a time unto every purpose under the heaven," and last night wasn't the time for that.

Another thing we need to worry about --
and this might be as good a time as any to do it -- is an ideologically obsessed and hyperventilating media culture that doesn't know its Ecclesiastes.

While we were otherwise occupied. . . .


Wednesday evening, all the cable-news chatterers were chattering away about President Obama, birthers, evil Republicans and evil Democrats.

They were losing their minds over Donald Trump losing his mind.

Well, not Piers Morgan, it must be said.
Cable News Network's resident Brit was giddy over the someday-heir to the throne's impending marriage to a commoner way too good looking for Himself.

As far as we know (and the ranks are growing by the minute), 269 would-be viewers in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky were otherwise occupied. They were dying -- being bludgeoned, sliced, impaled or crushed as massive tornadoes turned the world around them into rubble.

Of course, you would have been hard pressed to notice if you were watching CNN, MSNBC or the Fox News Channel. Lawrence, Rachel, Eliot, Ed, Bill and Sean had bigger fish to fry, better "Others" to hate on than to focus on a bunch of Bubbas being ground up in the worst tornado outbreak since 1974.

SEE, to the media elite -- and to Washington . . . and to the think tanks . . . and to the entertainment industry . . . and to the eternally outraged activists whose continued existence depends upon staying eternally outraged (and making sure Lawrence, Rachel, Eliot, Ed, Bill and Sean do, too) -- we're all The Other, pretty much.

We don't matter, just our money or our votes. And if we're dead, there's no percentage in noticing that 269 of us just got bludgeoned, sliced, impaled or crushed to Kingdom Come.


ON THE other hand, video like this is da bomb. Pretty dramatic stuff here. Stuff's getting blowed up good, and you can cut the dramatic tension with a knife as the meteorologists' voices grow ever more urgent as the milewide Swirling Wall of Death (TM) approaches.

Yeah, with video like this, and with daylight views of all this rubble, 269 dead Bubbas might be worth a second look. Cable "news" might have an opening between the more urgent political contretemps Wednesday and the more pressing royal wedding Friday. Let's see whether CNN, MSNBC and Fox can shoehorn it in.

Rachel can blame it on global warming and the GOP. Sean can blame it on an angry God who's had it with the godless Democrats.

And Anderson can keep the tornadic supercells honest. Might work.


Videotape at 5:30, analysis at 8.