Are we rehabilitating Lysenko now? Say it isn't so -- I already feel old enough, especially after reading the bulk of this thread.

-- William Timberman

I've heard of him. Hmmmm? Lysenkoism? Ah! He was fooling around with the Ergot Fungus and discovered Lysergic acid, right?

Oy! I have a migraine!

Oy! Have I got a migraine!

I think you were a little tough on kate - I disagree with everything she states about Obama but I couldn't find that much fault with her experience in New Orleans. I had a similiar experience which let me to a different conclusion.

I am able to vote for Obama or for Hillary but I understand where Obama is coming from.

My 'tiny little mind' is all too familiar with child abuse, spousal abuse, alcoholism, suicide, schizophrenia, mental illness, homelessness, rape, family betrayal, a city destroyed by the greatest natural disaster this country has ever known (and subsequently abandoned), the near-death of a spouse due to horribly botched surgery and oh, let's see...what am I forgetting here? You have NO idea who you're talking to, so spare me your tidy little lectures. Granted I have never suffered racial discrimination, unless you count all those years in New Orleans when my husband was denied promotion because he didn't fit the right racial profile. I entered New Orleans a flaming liberal, steeped in the ethos of the Sixties, and I left it mumbling to myself, "I need to leave this place while I'm still a liberal."

All the fun stuff, and you are white! Do you get migraines, too?

So yes, this country very much needs to have a conversation on racial relations. But this conversation needs to be an honest one, not a futile exercise in extracting guilt from those who needn't have any, nor a game of one-upmanship. There are plenty of blacks in this country who've had easier lives than whites, and vice-versa.

What better time to have it than during a major election in America could there be?

Put it this way: some of us came from homes which were severely dysfunctional. The challenge is to understand what happened and lose the anger, self pity, and bitterness, to simply get on with life, stop looking back, even though we may end up handicapped in the American, capitalist scheme of things. Is there anything wrong with applying this paradigm to matters racial?

What is a "functional" home? It might be "Leave It To Beaver" but even I would have taken a cleaver to Ward, June and Wally.

Who put the rum in the chocolate bunny?

-- KateTex

"We were actually discussing several such 'whacko-demagogue pastors'"

No, we weren't. Onde-loon's post was addressed to me, and I hadn't mentioned any other pastor nor had I mentioned sex or male prostitutes or any of the other things she seemed keen on discussing.

I know it's convenient for you frothing lefties to smear vaseline on the lens and try to blur everything in to one big moral equivalance, but like it or not the spotlight is on Obama at the moment, and it has nothing to do with prurience or puritanism but a real concern as to whether Obama has some kind of sympathy with the man's views.

"the tendency of the media to mis-portray what are objectively accurate if perhaps inartfully worded sentiments when uttered by an African-American clergyman"

Misportray? Rubbish. The comments speak for themselves. They don't need media adornment. Obama's number came up, simple as; he's had months of media bootlicking. Your attempt to imply media racism is behind this is a typical baseless smear from a lefty desperado.

"You, in contrast, simply want to mis-focus on the second and reinforce the prevailing meme that those select few sentences from Rev. Wright bely an animus that irretrievably stains Senator Obama."

I think you mean 'belie'. And, like it or not, presidential candidates are,in part, judged by the company the keep. Generally I've been quite impressed by Senator Obama's choice of company, but Tony Rezko and Pastor Wright give one cause for doubt.

"I'm not a woman"

You sound like one.

Oy, indeed. If acquired characteristics can be inherited after all, I can see it now: Jesus academies with real malice aforethought. Vast Jesus armies descending on the coastal Sodoms and wiping them from the map....

We DFH's will be faced with a true existential crisis -- a genetic engineering gap. I wonder if either Hillary or Obama have given this looming catastrophe any serious thought.

On taboos

ta·boo also ta·bu (t-b, t-)

n. pl. ta·boos also ta·bus

1. A ban or an inhibition resulting from social custom or emotional aversion.

2.

a. A prohibition, especially in Polynesia and other South Pacific islands, excluding something from use, approach, or mention because of its sacred and inviolable nature.

b. An object, a word, or an act protected by such a prohibition.

Many people say that "Race" is the most taboo topic of discussion in America.

It is not.

Drugwar is the most taboo topic in America.

Americans have been having discussions about the topic of "Race" in the USA- across the divides of experience- for a great many years now. Sometimes productively, sometimes merely pointing fingers and assigning blame- but at least the points that matter are actually brought out in the open.

Except for how that elephant in America's living room, Drug Prohibition, has warped this society across the board. Including its effects on poor and disenfranchised black communities. Not primarily through the presence of "drugs"- not primarily so; but through the nurturing of the criminal class that profits from the illegal drug trade, coincident with the concentration of enforcement and imprisonment efforts on poor and disenfranchised black/immigrant/minority communities.

The Zero Tolerance Drugwar is indeed "racist" (although that is by no means it's only intolerable flaw.) It's a misreading of the facts to view that racism as due to a consciously designed, unified effort on the part of its adherents and administrators But it's racist to this extent- if the Drugwar was prosecuted against white Americans to the same extent that it's been prosecuted against black Americans, the white majority would find it intolerable, and do something to reform the laws.

The actual dynamic that people are complaining about in this discussion as due to "black pathology" is actually more accurately the ascension of "gangster culture"- which was a social inevitability over the trajectory of the last 30 years or so, given that the illegal street drug market employs more Americans than the fast-food industry.

You know, I really have been a cab driver, with well over 1000 night shifts in the years between 1985 and 2005. Maybe 2000...I lost track of the score long ago. I'm saying that because I've seen what's happened to the youth over that time, in the town where I drove.

I also remember what it was like to be a teenager.

In 50+ pages of mostly chasing tails and pointing fingers, this is perhaps the single most insightful comment I've read:

"where does the idea of the burden of ''acting white'' come from? One explanation the authors offer will make sense to anyone who has ever seen a John Hughes movie: there's an ''oppositional peer culture'' in every high school -- the stoners and the jocks making fun of the nerds and the student-government types. When white burnouts give wedgies to white A students, the authors argue, it is seen as inevitable, but when the same dynamic is observed among black students, it is pathologized as a racial neurosis."

The difference? White kids have more options. We're more able to shed our legal transgressions and petty delinquencies, without being branded for life as The Enemy Within.

And, no, I don't think that using drugs is "criminal behavior." Risky, foolhardy, reckless...likely so, especially for adolescents. But it ain't like mugging someone, or breaking into a house, or shoplifting. Or even littering, in my view. DUI is different. And no one should be able to "blame" their antisocial behavior on the dope they took. But no one can tell me that ingesting any form of illegal drug is more socially hazardous than binge drinking, which has become epidemic in this country.

But what's really driven both the rise in incarceration- 400%!- and the rise of the Gangster Culture over the past three decades isn't using illegal drugs, it's selling them. That's how teenagers get to afford those "19-inch spinners" and road-quaking auto stereo systems, after all. That easy money is also what encourages them to adopt the fast life- the one that tends to hit the wall after a few years of AdultHood, often with one of those Mandatory Minimum sentences that "sends the message" that "dope dealing" is a worse crime than aggravated assault, rape, mayhem, or even murder. What's left to lose, after that?

Like I say, if the Drugwar had been laid on white middle class communities the way it is Downtown, the citizenry wouldn't stand for it. Things would have changed long ago.

But this situation is not spoken of, either in the mass media, or in the general run of discussions concerning so-called "black pathology."