Onkel Baracks Huette

Sullivan calls it racism, but it really is no such thing. The one thing Europeans can never quite get about America is the deep and complicated legacy of slavery, segregation and racism... a complicated poison that inflects or infects everything from our greatest literature (Huckleberry Finn) to our earnest, touching, at times almost 'quaint' political correctness about race that is such a far cry from the overarching irony that we find everywhere else in our mass culture.

In other words, I tack it up to a deeply emblematic cultural misunderstanding - plus of course the stupidity of waggish headline writers.