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Here's a bit of casual racism from the New York Times' lead editorial today: "Poor neighborhoods are the killing box, and if a drive-by shooting occurs there it may touch the middle-class heart, but it does not chill the soul. When a criminal like the sniper demonstrates that he can strike anywhere — in a mall, by a school, at a bus — we tend to endow him with unique personal qualities."
Michael Moore's film Bowling for Columbine, in theatres now and worth a look, shows how the media demonizes the black male "other" as the main source of crime in America. After seeing that film's endless montage of blowdried talking heads saying "The suspect is a black male...", you couldn't help but wince when news outlets blitzed the world with John Muhammad's headshot, before he was officially accused of anything. Here we go again. Of course the rightwing nutball commentators seized on the accused's last name, trying to add fuel to Bush's Anti-Islamic Crusade, but surely the most salient fact is not Muhammad's race or religion but that he's ex-Army, and an angry Gulf War veteran to boot. Chalk 10 dead as more blowback from bad government policy in '91, add them to the five spouses brutally murdered by Delta Force guys returning from Afghanistan, and think about all the future mayhem GWB is about to unleash. As one of those kids whose deaths don't chill our middle-class souls might say, "Actions have consequences, yo."
Addenda: In an essay that appeared a few days after this post, Alexander Cockburn made a more fleshed-out argument for the sniper-as-blowback, including a recitation of all the domestic killings by US military personnel, post-Afghanistan. Also, a friend read the Times quote above and didn't believe me that that paper could be that callous. Surely I had misread a comment that was intended to be an ironic take on the average blockhead view. No, unfortunately it was that view straight up. In the comments to this post, I've included a longer excerpt from the editorial to put the remarks in context. I assume these lines were written by Gail Collins, the Times' editorial page editor.