Making themselves to home.The latest alienated, homicidal incompetent to personalize the sort of racial pandering the president is presently cranking to eleven for the 2012 campaign was shot and killed by police today. And we're off:
"He used to do so much for the community. Something must have happened to make him flip out like this", said Pastor Oscar Dace of Bible Way Christian Center. "Everybody just can't believe that this has happened".Recall Omar Thornton's (no doubt to his mind heroic) final testament:"this is a racist place". What child-like confidence he had in its power to absolve him of cold-blooded murder (racism is the universal moral solvent, present in all human agency); that confidence was quickly validated by the unconscionable coverage that followed.
The comparison to Thornton isn't apt, though. Omar was an apolitical dullard. Shareef Allman has been identified by his friends and neighbors as a "pillar of the community" and, with the grim-comic oblivousness only black Americans can manage, a "kind-hearted mediator of conflict" who hosted a public access show and even got to interview Jesse Jackson on camera. This was a black man politically active in his community, an intellectual and emotional imbiber of the Narrative,* exacting retribution for, as he sees it, discrimination. How much more explicit does racial-political violence have to get for the topic to be broached by the High and Serious of the media?
*At this point I don't know the level and nature of Allman's activism. Sure would like to get a look at those public-access shows (the crazy sh-t you find yourself saying!).
update: I just got my wish. This was not a politically sophisticated fellow. A standard issue idiot. Met a hundred of them. God help us.
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