Late summer thoughts

If I were a Jungian, I might suggest that America's racist collective unconscious is trying to kill Barack Obama by killing people who look like him:  Trayvon Martin, Victor White, Eric Garner, John Crawford, Michael Brown, Kajieme Powell, Gregory Towns, even Renisha McBride.  After six years of watermelon cartoons, rodeo clowns, Birther idiocies and barely coded complaints about "laziness," white-on-black violence has spiked and shows no signs of abating, even among police.  Fifty years of progress means tanks and tear gas instead of fire hoses and police dogs.  Frankly, I'm surprised only a few young men have been enraged enough to follow the path of Douglas McArthur McCain.

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George Carlin was more explicitly political, but I don't recall that he evoked the bile-spewing commentary that followed the death of Robin Williams.  Williams must have led an exemplary life to earn  the loathing of Pat Robertson, the Westboro Baptists (no funeral to disrupt) and Jabba the Rush.  I was amazed nobody at Fox "News" said, "You know who else had Parkinson's and killed himself?  Hitler."  Which is their idea of a walk-off, game-winning argument.