Charleston Massacre

Nine African American citizens are shot in a church charged with the energy of its place in the history of Africans in America.  In case the import of the deed was not obvious, according to survivors the killer told the victims that "you haveto go" because "You rape our women and you're taking over our country."  The terrorist murderer, Dylann Storm Roof, seems to have taken direct action on the advice of so many right wing fear-mongers to "take back our country."

Still, says presidential candidate Lindsey Graham, "I just think he [Roof] was one of these whacked-out kids. I don't think it's anything broader than that. . . .  It's about a young man who is obviously twisted."  The basis for his assertion?  Well, his niece had been in an eight grade English class with Storm, and, says Graham, his niece does not recall that Storm ever made any "statements related to race."

Officials on the ground know better.  They accept that the act was "racially motivated."  Face Book knows better:  Roof's profile picture shows him in a jacket adorned with the flags of apartheid South Africa and white-dominated Rhodesia.  Roof's roommate, Dalton Tyler, also knows better.  According to him, Roof "was big into segregation and other stuff. . . . He said he wanted to start a civil war. He said he was going to dosomething like that and then kill himself."  Motivating a larger action, a civil war or a jihad, is the stated reason for terrorism nowadays.  Roof is, just simply, a terrorist.

The public voice for the right wing in the country, however, could not understand why anyone would call Roof's unspeakable act even a hate crime.  Instead, Fox News analysts said that it was a crime against religion.  And the most bloody-minded of the right wing political class, presidential candidate Richard Santorum, agreed that the attack was an assault on religious liberty, not a terrorist act motivated by racist hatred.

For the Fox News analysts, the obvious solution is to arm pastors and congregants.  Santorum, apparently, had no recommendation beyond a greater devotion to prayer.

What no one in the community of right-wing speakers seems to want to acknowledge is the self-evident point, that Roof's terrorist act is simply racist.  No one states the obvious, that the conversation—or rather, the provocations expressed on an almost daily basis by the right-wing fear machine, that "they" have taken over the country, that "they" have changed the country so that it is no longer the land of the free, that "they" have destroyed liberty and corrupted justice and all for the sake of that needy 47%, as Mitt Romney infamously said.  The closest that the major media gets to acknowledging the truth is the anodyne, really wrong-headed commentary by Peter Baker, whose column is titled "Charleston Shootings Undercut Hope Obama Brought for Better Race Relations."  Really, Mr. Baker?  Really?

Why is it so difficult to acknowledge the obvious?  Would acknowledging the racism of American life endanger the power of the powerful?  Is the right-wing fear machine correct that the minimal adjustment of social inequities that Pres. Obama has tried to undertake do destroy the fabric of the nation?  If so, then it must follow that the weft of the American social fabric, the fundamental framework onto which the decorative warp of out national thread is woven the weft itself depends on racial separation and injustice.

Is that why the Fox News analysts, or Lindsey Graham, or Richard Santorum and their ilk are incapable of stating the obvious truth?