By David Mark Greaves

The Plight of the Right

As we go to press, the 16-day government shutdown is ending and the threat of default on government debt is over.   What remains is a clearer picture of the Tea Party Caucus that has been created by a gerrymandering process that was meant to carve out districts that could be depended upon to vote Republican.  This was achieved, but now the country is confronted with the unintended consequence of   the concentration of the darker side of the Republican spectrum, the white supremacists and those without empathy but with lots of anger at the loss of the Confederacy and the changes in the America they thought was always theirs.  They are fiercely righteous and easily roused, ripe targets for the multitude of PACs, radio hosts, TV networks and other revenue machines that rile them up with  long missives about saving America with the subliminal and sometimes not so, message that theirs is an effort to save the white race.  And they take PayPal.

That President Obama has to deal with crazies in congress rather than work on solving problems must be a source of great frustration for him.

I Couldn’t Believe It

There is coming to television a series only a white supremacist could love.  It takes the hundreds of years of the trauma of slavery and raping of Black women and updates it to 2048 in a show called Almost Human.  The concept is of a Black man, a “synthetic” (a term used in the show as “ni–er” would be) who is an Almost Human creation of white scientists to be the neutered assistant to the white guy who is in bed with a Black woman.  We mention the name of the show only to advise you don’t watch it.  It has guns, explosions and good-looking stars, but it is such a racist concept that African-Americans should certainly not allow children to be exposed to it.  This is the kind of messaging that is injurious to the mental health of developing minds, suggesting as it does that 200 years after slavery, the relationship between the races will not have changed.