You know the drill

It’s all so predictable: bomb explodes, wackos call for retaliatory destruction of Iraq, Iran, Muslim enemy country du jour (but NOT fundamentalist ally Saudi Arabia, busily generating actual extremists), dark-skinned people are fingered and pilloried in the yellow press based on zero evidence (like Salah Barhoum who committed the crime of attending the Marathon while Moroccan), and finally VOILA! the culprit turns out to be someone who looks like an extra from Leave It To Beaver.

If the suspects whose photos are plastered all over turn out to be responsible for the loathsome Boston act, all discussion of the political implications and collective responsibility of the ethnic group they belong to (white guys) will immediately cease. We will then start to look at the twisted weirdness of their lives, but whiteness and maleness will not enter into the picture.

But the whole sordid episode is even more delusional and racist than that. What if the demented fuck who blew up little kids and crippled bystanders HAD been a member of some minority group? So what? Muslims or Sri Lankans or toe-worshipping tribes on remote islands can’t produce homicidal madmen? Why does collective guilt only apply to people not like us?

And furthermore, as many commentators have pointed out, why do we only care about bombs that blow up in OUR homeland, at OUR public events? It’s galling to be fed nonstop coverage of the Marathon bombing (even when it’s not laughably false) as if the world just ended while simultaneously our own government thinks nothing of annihilation-by-drone of Afghan or Yemeni wedding parties while we barely stop to notice, much less object. It would take nothing away from our sympathy for the three Boston victims if some concern could be discovered lurking in the collective awareness for the dozens of dead bodies and amputated limbs being generated by the guy who just showed up at the Boston Cathedral to intone pious sentiments about innocent human lives.