Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Rest assured. Terrorist threats will not deter the United States from its military occupation of Muslim lands, and we will never allow profiling of Muslims in our airports.

Some among us take considerable pride in each assertion and find no conflict between them. Public opinion is less enthusiastic, but the two cover most of the regnant status quo demanded by elite consensus.

The good news is the caliber of high-profile arrestees suggest a still shallow pool of talent from which to recruit "home-grown"—or transplanted—terrorists. The class of more capable terrorists we reasonably expected after 9-11 hasn't shown up, even now, two occupations and three wars later. Qaeda shot their wad that day, but the blow still resonates through our actions and collective psyche.
The hapless prospects the feds have helped along their way to high-profile arrests impress far more for their malice than imagination. This late in the game and we're pursuing sting operations that draw lone foot-soldiers into crude conspiracies. Arguably a manageable problem that would be improved by withdrawing from our Middle East entanglements, the ostensible purpose of which is defense against this domestic threat.

This is predicated on a charitable reception of the FBI's account. In truth, when we are introduced to Mohamed Osman Mohamud and his sexually ambiguous war-face, we should first ask if we needed to make his odious acquaintance at all. We can assume the prospect of a long, probably fruitless surveillance pales next to the "plot thwarted" for law enforcement, and it's always just a whisker's breadth to justification when you've got such as the sneer of Osman. Officials pimping the "very real" threat of a "spectacular" attack sounded a bit like a band imploring their audience to dance on the strength of a few notes. But Fox will pick it up from here, I imagine.

If Osman is not the face of domestic terrorism we are compelled to make him the face of constitutional rights. Thanks a lot, government. And what a perfectly predictable, unreasoning face to intrude on the TSA/profiling meta-scandal, calling attention to our future reliance on diverse new Americans remaining indifferent to diverse new imperial adventures.

Sensing just such tensions, one local rag went beyond the “end of the world hits women and minorities hardest” gag:

That might explain why no Portland group is quite as shaken by the arrest and arraignment of Mohamed Mohamud than the city's Somali community, several thousand strong.

"As a Somali, it's, 'Oh, my God, one more thing we'll be remembered for,'" said Muna Abshir Mohamud, who works for the city of Portland's Office of Human Relations. "It's one of those images that's hard to unstick."

Since the eastern African country collapsed in civil war in 1991, the most memorable images out of Somali have featured pirates and burning helicopters.

In the first two years of that civil war, an estimated 300,000 Somalis died of starvation, but most Americans remember only that the ensuing United Nations humanitarian mission ended with the deaths of 18 U.S. soldiers in the chaotic streets of Mogadishu.

"To this day, if you say, 'Somalia,' it's" -- Muna Mohamud snaps her fingers -- " 'Black Hawk Down.'"

More recently, Somali pirates have dominated the news in the waters of the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden, attacking cargo ships, hijacking supertankers and British yachts, and stealing off with millions in ransom.

Both Musse Olol and Muna Mohamud attended a Somali peace and unity rally outside Portland's City Hall on Sunday, and both spoke movingly about what they abandoned in Africa and discovered in America.

Olol, who left Somalia in 1981, remembers a country caught in the grip of the Cold War, so ruled by weapons that he was schooled -- literally -- in the use of an AK-47 assault rifle.
[...]
For the next -- and younger -- generation of Somalis, however, there is more restlessness, fewer jobs and harder feelings.

"All teenagers rebel," Muna Mohamud said. "For kids who aren't occupied, there are all kinds of activities out there. Sometimes it's running with the wrong crowd. Sometimes it's ending up at the wrong mosque."

"I don't think Portland is equipped to help the youth," Olol said. "The sense of family breaking down. It's like when you join a gang. They go after the kids who don't have the good support.

["Portland-area Somalis shaken by brush with disaster at Pioneer Courthouse Square" The Oregonian, 11/29/10]

Civil war, pirates, burning helicopters, Olol's arms training; Portland's not "equipped" to counter their effects? Imagine that! Outrageous! In all seriousness, how "shaken" can they be? But now that we've demonstrated our concern by asking, can we gently ask how well equipped are the Somalis for America? Alas, no. The tiger that attacked his trainer didn't go "crazy", as goes one of many Chris Rock jokes he's going to want to take back some day, that tiger went tiger.

Somehow obscured by all this is the real threat to American lives in Afghanistan, Iraq and who knows where else. Six more were sacrificed to the impossible mission of training Afghans how to defend Afghanistan against other, more determined Afghans. We've absently blown right past the cautionary Vietnam analogy, which at this point is an insult to the ARVN and a compliment to the Viet Cong. There are more fundamental differences too; the above-mentioned assassination might have been a scandal of historic import in that previous folly. Monday it was an inconsequential wisp in the electronic torrent. Tomorrow's street executions will be so much internet snuff at this rate.

Among the present casualties should be the customary belief in a fundamental link between colonialism and racism. Its promise remains the guiding light of the elect and the Burden is endured by fewer than ever, but if you look past the re-branding and the garish new Benneton-ad frontispiece, you'll see it's brought to us by the dissolute ideological heirs of the same old make. They glory in its death under the old name, while championing it under the new. In twinning the triumphalist narrative of the civil rights movement with American exceptionalism, the sins of the past are justification for the sins of the present. They're hard to distinguish side by side; the only difference I see is the current dishonesty.

No; today Oregon teens die abroad to protect us from the "Oregon Teen". God forbid you should suggest keeping the teens in their respective national homes. Might we send the ideologues packing at least?

Friday

Primal Scream, Loaded


LCD Soundsystem, Home; NSFW (not safe for wussies)

A little intoxication never hurt no one.

Excuse me while I bust a freestyle:

angry mothers and martinets,
drunken brawlers and malcontents,
city dwellers and suburbanites,
phony players and proselytes,
get down, get down tonight...

confound tommorrow with yesterday,
toxic bliss lures woe away,
baptize yourself in neon light,
parry existential fright,
and get down, get down tonight...

our souls are held in solution,
with moonlight's gentle resolution,
rippled with eternal rhyme,
distilling space with metered time,
when we get down, get down tonight...

our cares return with break of day,
we cannot choose another way,
our destiny's the close of night,
we won't escape this mortal blight,
so come get down, get down tonight...

stick that in your Grammy ash-tray, Lil Wayne

Equality, now

The Republican Party's continuing survival now depends as much on the Democratic Party's inherent contradictions as anything else. The latter has become less a labor party than a coalition of identity groups united in resentment toward a myth of majority privilege that grows more fabulous and farcical by the day, and--being identity groups--viewing one another with precariously contained hostility.

For their part the Democrats' most audacious achievement has been in keeping alive a quaint image of Republicans as natural demagogues, despite the fact that ethnic, sexual and class resentment long ago became the greater part of their own populist appeal. They manage this through their successful use of the fallacy of disparate impact (disparity in representation is de facto discrimination, thus any opposition to its remedy is bigotry of one form or another) and their appeal--ironically for the party of "tolerance" and egalitarianism--to minority racial bigotry and elite chauvinism.

When Republicans transgress their commitment to unilateral disarmament in this cold war of the races, cynically (for they do not mean it) condescending to address, in meek code, the concerns of white Americans as a group, they at least have ready at hand the spectacle of a vast, stifling complex of legal discrimination that daily confiscates their rights, opportunities and wealth, distributing them to virtually every one who is, by legal decree and social sanction, not them.

Contrast this with the Democrats' mirror-opposite demagogy asserting that these extraordinary efforts are not enough, due to the stubborn bigotry of this "privileged" class. Combining this with the current quasi-religious faith in a family of human races blandly undifferentiated by talents or tendencies (or even biology), liberals deliberately perpetuate a Great Slander--to wit, the failure of this generations-old edifice of legal and economic discrimination to equalize results, unprecedented in history or size, can only be attributed to the stubborn malice of the majority. The implication is that these perpetually failing, ever-greater efforts to cure minority under-representation are like a descending plumb sounding the still unknown depths of white racism. Hence, the relative mediocrity of "protected classes" in education and the professions continually produces political advantage. Weakness is strength. You have to admire the sinister, if incidental, brilliance of it. How comfortable some of our more sentient liberal demagogues must feel when considering the durability of disparity.

In this light, I find it incredible that liberals are shocked, shocked at the "whiteness" (somehow this phrase is inoffensive) of the Tea Party movement. This movement is precisely what they've been creating by decades of triangulation, through legal discrimination, demagogy and cultural derision. The Tea Party and reaction to it is the end game of those efforts and would have been expected had our more vociferous liberal demagogues not fallen for their own rhetoric and come to believe their own caricatures. Denying the humanity of a given class--how very illiberal.
Now, cornered and isolated from their countrymen by the formidable barriers of confiscatory patronage and cultural condemnation, assessing with greater clarity than the elite the reality of Barack Obama's ascent--the final marriage of corporate power with the diversity state--they are fighting back. But the liberals, po-faced in their naivete, apparently took seriously the notion that they had no right to self-defense, that mere exposure would chasten them into final, fearful submission or drive them into violent extremism (thus the tendency to see just that, despite the relative mildness of the movement). They are appalled to find them unrepentant, law-abiding and combative; how dare they? It's almost as if they're surprised to discover their bogeyman exists at all.

Liberals are appalled at the vigor of their victim's death throes, by its refusal to expire quietly. In the crude logic of "white privilege" these people cannot be victims--neither of the state nor of the racial violence this libel-as-virtue sanctions. The "racist" aspect of the amorphous and inconsistent Tea Party movement is its only coherent feature and its greatest justification and, despite convention, is nothing for which its members should apologize. Any group, however identified, has the right to defend itself against confiscation, slander and violence; the conventional double-standard that would deny them this right only makes their fight more necessary. The "Tea Partiers" are the unwitting last defenders of civil rights and racial equality.

But what the Democrats have attempted to fashion into a singular disdain for the very idea of a white majority is in reality many competing strands, intertwined and choking one another like ivy striving toward the sun of political dominance.
Homosexuals must fear and feel superior to straights at the same time they are encouraged to mimic the same heterosexual conventions the broader sexual revolution has eroded (yet we're told heterosexuals have already destroyed marriage, so what's the problem with gays caricaturing it?); women who don't view every personal and professional disappointment as evidence of a grand patriarchal conspiracy are ungrateful traitors to feminism; Hispanics cannot be allowed to assimilate, lest they lose what in this milieu is a distinct advantage, their historical grievance and envy of "Anglos"; Asians are encouraged to ignore their disproportionate scholastic success and wealth (which would presumably be greater if not for white malice--how this squares with liberals' insistence on their belief in absolute racial equivalence goes, like its many related contradictions, unchallenged) so that they too may partake of the spoils; naturally, aspirational whites must distinguish themselves from recalcitrant whites, or conspicuously decry their race as fervently as they encourage racial pride in non-whites; blacks, our most defiantly bigoted and narrow-minded Americans in part because of their proud primacy atop this hierarchy of grievance, need no encouragement to despise and distrust the rest.

Needless to say, all are relieved of taking responsibility for their own lot, much less for the whole of the nation. Unity my ass, Mr. President. The more dependent, the more criminal, the more wretched a given population is, the greater the guilt and presumed malice of the majority--a majority which in reality bears no resemblance to the monolithic entity presumed when we speak of a "white majority". Meanwhile, global migratory patterns have been mocking the myth of Racist White America on an epic scale for over a century; one's improvement in prospects by coming to America is directly proportionate to their place in the hierarchy of grievance. No one is more fortunate to be an American than a black American. But now that "civil rights" is an Orwellian phrase, outsized ethnic pride, patronage and legal discrimination are promoted as progress in the cause of legal equality and racial tolerance. Language and logic themselves have been thrown on the funeral pyre of the liberal Western tradition. Call it a cost of diversity if you will; I call it the cost of cowardice.

The nominal party of progress and cosmopolitanism myopically promotes insularity, parochialism and ethnocentrism wherever it sees advantage therein. Where they expect to find "unity" in this morass is any one's guess; of course, their notion of unity is necessarily perverted by the demands of their creed. What they call unity is the marshaling of disparate forces for the destruction of political enemies, for swamping critical inquiry beneath the weight of aggregated prejudice. Diversity already precludes open discussion of topics such as race and ethnicity; no one wants to be told they're "inferior" (other than conspicuously self-flagellating whites). We must unite to destroy the last vestiges of a foul, former order, our betters tell us. Unity, as envisioned by Barack Obama's mandarins of mediocrity, is an assault on the liberal republic, which is by definition a polity divided to check human constants such as ethnicity, interest, faction and ambition.

The success of the Democratic party rests increasingly on the reality (and implied threat) of violence; street crime is a form of individual rebellion against an oppressive society and rioting a natural periodic occurrence, if you believe the lies that are routinely passed off unchallenged, from the president on down. That they've managed to convince many of us that right-wingers are complicit in violence with every dissent from this narrative, despite the outright encouragement of murder and mayhem they engage in as a matter of course, is testament more to our cowardice as a people than to their narrative skills.

The Republicans, revealing themselves to be as bereft of courage as they are lacking in imagination, counter that the Democrats are the true "racists", rather than challenge the destructive and divisive lie that is "racism". We too, and more than you, could be their slogan. The mentality behind this is nothing new, and was aptly and comically portrayed in the Cohen brothers' film O Brother Where Art Thou, where a more capable brain-trust around Mississippi governor Menelaus "Pappy" O'Neil debates how to respond to their opponents' successful use of a novelty:

First Advisor:
Well, it's a well-run campaign. Midget and broom and whatnot.
Second Advisor:
Devil his due. Hell of an awganisation.
Junior (Pappy's idiot son):
- Say, I got an idea.
First Advisor:
- What's that, Junior?
Junior:
-We can hire us a little fella even smaller than Stokes's.
Pappy (slaps Junior with his hat):
-Y'ignorant slope-shouldered sack a guts! Why we'd look like a buncha satchel-ass Johnnie Come-Latelies braggin' on our own midget! Don't matter how stumpy! And that's the g**damn problem right there - people think this Stokes got fresh ideas, he's oh coorant and we the past.

The Republicans of reality are less sophisticated intellectually than this fictional hayseed. Needless to say, their strategy is no winner. But they would rather be wrong and losing slower, than right and losing faster, as they see it. They are invested in a corrupt system, as junior partners. Those of us who don't know better think there's still some advantage in being right, and trust even now in the ability of our countrymen, whose resentment has been so carefully cultivated these many years, to be finally lured to reason by the truth, plainly spoken and honestly offered (let's pause here, as you and I look at each other a moment before breaking out in bitter laughter).

The Republicans are the party of corporate and military power; the Democrats are the party of misery, mediocrity and malice. The two grow closer every day, as institutions have learned the costs of imposed mediocrity in the name of equality can be passed on to consumers and citizens, and in any case are far less expensive than the price of principled resistance. So the Republicans were in no position to recognize, much less coherently critique, the fatuity of Barack Obama's "trans-formative" election. Their response was to go find a high-profile token of their own, the lamentable Michael Steele, television personality. Needless to say he has been a disaster limited only by the amount of influence he's been denied. Correcting the mistake that is Michael has been complicated by the Republicans' success in the mid-terms. The fight is on and it's t-minus twenty-four hours (at least that's what I would choose in the office pool) before Steele starts crying racism. The Republicans, drawing from a diversity well far shallower than the Democrats, get the tokens they deserve.

Bach, Cello Suite No. 6, Prelude (BWV 1012), Mischa Maisky

Derision Qwest

I gave in last night and called the cable company to have my Internet service resumed. After setting up an appointment with Comcast for next Tuesday I stewed over the delay (an indignity magnifying the indignity of my surrender) and decided to see what Verizon had to offer.
I discovered that one calls Qwest (here at least) to inquire about Verizon services. The first call was answered by a woman whose accent was something I'll identify as West Coast-African American surly, reading from a script, with an enthusiasm level registering in a negative value (suddenly those phony-cheery service folk are sounding a lot better).

Each simple question was received with difficulty and answered with impatience. Eventually she got around to asking, in a flat tone barely registering as inquisitive, for the "physical street" where service was needed. Already chastened by implication to take her literally, I gave her the street name where I live. Of course this caused much confusion, and I gingerly offered my full address. She protested that she had already asked me that (apparently she was prompted, and failed, to ask for a "physical street address", as opposed I presume to a metaphysical street address; most likely Qwest doesn't trust its front-line troops to be capable of distinguishing street from email addresses).
We labored on, she and I, miserable each in our own way, with the sound of at least two other customer service reps in the background nearly drowning us out until finally I decided it was best just to hang up and try again, hoping for a better match.

The next customer service representative was reached the next day--today--because three successive calls were immediately disconnected before I reached a recording saying the office had closed for the day. My next co-foil was--no joke--a girl who identified herself as (my best guess) Taniqua.
T sounded like she was twelve, tonally and grammatically, and rushed through her set-questions in little desperate flurries. I went ahead and asked my own questions anyway, despite the fact that each seemed to knock her off a laboriously gained progress; she read off her responses from a script with redoubled obtuseness the purpose of which seemed to be that the exchange should not lapse into spontaneous human interaction and thus out of her already tenuous control. Still I could only manage sympathy for Taniqua where her predecessor inspired contempt. I've been incompetent at things myself after all (I am a contender for world's worst at many of the things at which I've tried my hand), and there are few greater humiliations, though I doubt she felt anything greater than annoyance and confusion. Empathizing with her plight I said I'd give it some thought and hung up.

And yet, I could not leave it alone. A third call captured a somewhat more sentient being. I was relieved to find what sounded like a young white male--either he would be more competent or his incompetence would serve to reassure me that I wasn't that dreaded of all things, a racist. Well, Colton was much better, but he too faltered a bit at each turn to his stubborn computer (as he helpfully narrated), and I, weary not just of mind but now of my very soul as I considered these were my youthful countrymen and certainly not the worst of them, I gently, grimly, set down the receiver. Defeat. If only I had a bit more patience.

It's a beautiful day outside. Barack Obama's army of the inept hasn't broken down the gates yet, and their awful din and the stench of the liberal Western tradition they've burned behind them like bridges back to reason can still be ignored, if you retreat far enough inward. Today I thrive still. I am outside and the trees are not yet bare. The women have left their heavy coats at home; the wake of a beautiful woman is unalloyed joy. America is a blessed place of ease and wonder. For the moment.

A little horse would be my paradise

Bruno S. 1932 - 2010

Werner Herzog found the mentally unstable Bruno Schleinstein, who was known briefly to the world as Bruno S., in a 1970 documentary called Bruno der Shwarze (Bruno the Black). At the time Bruno was a street musician, playing traditional ballads; he played piano, glockenspiel, accordion and hand bells. He spoke in declarative bursts of idiosyncratic phrasings, often referring to himself in the third person, a curious--or not so curious--affect considering the subject was often his history of suffering and despair at his state of estrangement from society. The authentic voice of the psychically wounded, which artists can only approximate, never become. Herzog cast him in two films, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and Stroszek, where he played the lead characters in his own enigmatic persona, his level of awareness and engagement with the process never quite certain.

Born in 1932, Bruno may have been beaten partly deaf by his prostitute mother before being abandoned at a very young age. He ended up in an orphanage run by the Nazis, where mentally retarded children and other Reichsausschusskinder (literally "Reich Committee Children"--wards of the state) were subjected to medical experimentation. As an adult Bruno worked days as a forklift driver and nights he made music. His primary neurosis was paranoia.

Bruno's difficulty hearing may have led to a mistaken diagnosis of retardation early on (fetal alcohol syndrome must be suspected here as well); he may have lost some mental faculties as a result of beatings either at the hands of his mother or the authorities; or he may have merely been damaged psychologically by the trauma of his early life, as Herzog believes.

His strange speech produced a spontaneous poetry of woe and anguish. He was paranoid and self-pitying--and for every good reason. He walked among us as a mangled specter from a barbarous yesterday, channeling the brutality of his history in through the sputtering device that was his damaged psyche. A living reproach from a past and a capacity for evil that are both too near.

Herzog wrote Stroszek specifically to place this strange character he’d found in a grim satire of nineteen-Seventies America. Herzog uses mostly non-professional actors throughout the film as the often grotesque characters Bruno-as-Stroszek encounters in Germany and America. He escapes a murderous pimp in Berlin to the indifference of a bleak plain in rural Wisconsin. The location and locals cast in Stroszek Herzog found while lurking about the hometown of Ed Gein (something about exhuming the grave of the killer’s mother). Herzog’s view of America is much like Bruno’s view of the world, morose and bemused, but compelling for its alien, distorted-lens focus and difficult to resist. A sort of retard strength.

Bruno believed he had been exploited and abandoned by Herzog, and many agree. There’s no doubt it was exploitation, but Bruno may have nonetheless benefited in the end from his fleeting celebrity. He resented Herzog for abandoning him along with the fair weather of celebrity he brought, but for Bruno happiness, as we understand it, was not a possibility.

It is fitting that Bruno should encompass also the shifty question of what constitutes exploitation. A reality television celebrity chooses to be exploited, often to extremes; society hasn't yet an answer for these--people whose individual actions become our collective embarrassments. Bruno S. was an early “reality” figure who chose his exploitation with an awareness that may or may not be less than that shown by the average current type we've come to know. But unlike them he lost no dignity, neither his nor ours, in the process. His ability to master the world was limited, but his capacity to feel was keen; in this sense he is the opposite of the modern reality figure—who games the world, sometimes skillfully, in blithe and childlike emotional indifference.

Bruno lived on the same installment plan of contingency and compromise with an ultimately indifferent world, as we all do, but on far harsher terms. Maybe that's what transfixed us, for a time; he was like us, visible and walking about, but farther down the abyss of human cruelty. Maybe that's why he was so easily forgotten.
He unsettled and mesmerized us because what we saw, in his unguarded and expressive face, was human cruelty expressing itself as the suffering of the living host that bears it along, like a germ planted long ago and thriving still.
At some terrifying level, within us all, the suffering and cruelty are indistinguishable. How else to understand this human constant that is evil? It is in the nuances of personality that we see these awful things, make these unwanted realizations. Personality was invented in the movie theater, where the living visage, in its endless expressions, is the subject.
Bruno's face was a hopeless plea, a perpetual surrender, and a haunting reproach. May he rest, at long last.

What is (a) hate (crime)? I

psy•cho•sis, n
loss of contact with reality: a psychiatric disorder such as schizophrenia or mania that is marked by delusions, hallucinations, incoherence, and distorted perceptions of reality.
Microsoft Encarta

Is it too soon, for decency, or too late, because things move fast nowadays, to speculate on the potential for an Omar Thornton fan page? Due to the solemn credulity with which the media addressed the accusations—of a killer against his still dying victims—no mass murderer has so quickly gained so high a platform for so petty a charge. When the crimination is “white racism” no decent interval is allowed. Neither, skepticism. Omar’s hearing was immediately and dutifully granted in response to his crimes, with the usual suspect “experts” weighing in—only this time on workplace discrimination, not, as we've come to expect, workplace violence.

This estimation of "racism", broadly defined, as the equivalent of violence (with the noose as a talisman and the "n-word" as incantation, both imbued with supernatural powers) is how the cultural commissariat sanctions black-on-white violence as an unfortunate but understandable means of redress.

The press response occurred at the nexus of willed ignorance and forced imagination. The sort of horrors before which this cloistered class feigns to shudder on behalf of Thornton and his ilk they can only imagine. And imagine they do, with energy and diligence. I had previously reckoned a sane man’s homicidal “breaking point” was well beyond an overheard slur, an item of graffiti, and a company’s objection to being systematically robbed by its own. Merely mentioning these charges here, even if true in their slender entirety, is to give them indecent attention. Forgive me, but this is a very dirty business.

And we still don’t know the depths to which our media will go to prove its ideological gullibility—no echoes of restraint have yet answered the pings of credulity that were the first news reports. Exhaustion, rather than shame, quelled the herd’s hysteria. We can say the farcical delusion goes at least as deep as this Christian Science Monitor headline:

Is racism at heart of Connecticut shooting? Answer still unclear.

How quaint of you, if you thought the answer all-too-clear in the case of a shooter singling out the middle-aged white men who built and sustained the company that employed and endured him (as they tend to do wherever we find productive endeavor—an unacknowledged fact explaining most of the deliberately cultivated resentment, eagerly taken up by Omar, for this, the last remaining class against which discrimination is codified into law and derision is compelled by culture). No, this "racism" doesn't interest the media. Even in the act of murder a black man isn't granted the capacity for hate that a white innocent bears like a human stain, shed not even in death. America's "original sin" is, after all, confined to white Americans in perpetuity, whoever they are and whatever they do. Sickening still, but no longer surprising.

The grotesque irony of pursuing a homicidal bigot’s complaints of racial harassment is only noticed by the irrelevant (my hand’s raised). Still, the CSM story above actually lagged the pack to the skeptical rear by featuring an authority discounting, rather than humoring or giving undue credence to, Omar’s charges. For the media the event worked like a brain-teaser, where habitual thinking leads one to miss plain meaning. You know:

one of the coins is a nickel; the doctor is the boy’s mother; the hateful murderer is the bigot.

No “but of course” moment is forthcoming. Here the press is like the ideal subject for a hypnotist’s lounge act: easily brought under, highly suggestible, shameless in its stupor, oblivious in retrospect.

This defamation of the dead isn‘t without its black comedy: the murderer was wearied, we’re told (by a callow girlfriend as oblivious to shame as the reporters encouraging her, reveling in the attention and enthusiastically adopting, as it were, the role usually reserved for a tearful mother), by the racism that just so happened to find him at every job. The chronically incompetent and stupid typically blame luck or a spiteful world for their misfortunes, and in Omar’s mind racism followed him like a personal storm cloud, manifested, I presume, in charges of tardiness, ineptitude, theft. Perhaps it is me who’s being naïve. After all, what a boundless reservoir of racism white America is!

The media’s appetite would not be sated before we were assured of the gentle nature of this man and his love for family, lovers, and handguns. One newspaper featured a photo spread of the widow (of the killer, not one of the killed), complete with an image of the tattoo consecrating her upper thigh to their love.

In this AP story some demanded (further) justice be delivered upon the dead:

Some experts said Friday that, although nothing justifies Thornton's killing spree, the allegations of workplace racism should be investigated so they can either be dealt with or laid to rest.
"You have to investigate it," said employment lawyer Kelly Scott, adding that racial harassment in the workplace is often a crime.

"Any chance you have to make your workplace a better place, a safer place, you have to take it," Scott said. "If there are people who have these attitude problems or problem dealing with other races, they should lose their jobs." [seems the company attempted just this, in firing Omar]

Sharon Toomer, founder of the website blackandbrownnews.com, called it "an accountability issue."
"If he didn't (report harassment), that's great. He's just a nut case," [but if he did...] she said. "If he did go and nobody did anything, then the company's hands are not clean." [killin' is too good for 'em]

Messages seeking comment about a potential investigation into Thornton's racism claims were left Friday for the Hartford State's Attorney's Office, the FBI's New Haven office, the chairman of the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities, and for the president of the Connecticut NAACP.

Once the guilt of the dead is confirmed by the standard of federal “civil rights law”—wherein the burden of proof is on the accused (here they can be said to be doubly disadvantaged, compelled by law to prove the negative in a voice rendered silent by their accuser; damn this teacher is strict!)—remedies will be considered. Perhaps a class action suit and subsequent settlement, an injunction mandating some sort of diversity program, a donation to an activist organization (and administration ally) of the Justice Department’s selection, the hiring of some member of the elect. Ms. Sherrod is available.
It has been a teachable moment.