Incomprehensible.
     The word's been used by some politicians and pundits to describe the latest American mass murder.  A white twenty-one year old with a bowl haircut, dead eyes, and a forty-five, shot and killed nine black adults in a church in Charleston, South Carolina.  News media spinning followed, with Fox News Channel the most color blind.  Jeb Bush said he can't comprehend how this could've happened.  For some, possible motives center around the young man's mental health and a desire to harm Christians.  The crime occurred in "a house of worship," suggesting to those who can't imagine what it might actually have been about, a level of hardcore evil operating on a spiritual playing field. 
     Massacres in schools and in a movie theater, at an outdoor political rally in Tucson, must not have the same spiritual weight as slaughter in a Bible study group meeting in a church, right?  Bullshit: all of them were equally terrible, their perpetrators--mentally ill or not--dangerous freaks with guns.
     After his arrest in North Carolina, this latest freak spoke bluntly to authorities, offering his reasons clearly and without ambiguity.  He wanted to start a race war.  He's a white supremacist.  He hates black people. 
     It took him an hour to start shooting.  In custody, he said the people in the study group were so nice to him he started having second thoughts.  Maybe so, but perhaps he was also screwing up his courage to start murdering people and it took about an hour for his brain to lock in determination with his trigger finger.  He killed a pastor and a South Carolina state senator, the latter murder qualifying as assassination.  There's much debate now about whether or not to call this atrocity domestic terrorism.  South Carolina, too, doesn't recognize hate crimes.  It's also the only state flying a Confederate flag over its capitol building.  That flag, unlike the flag of the country South Carolina belongs to, has flown this week at full mast.  This morning, South Carolina's former Governor Mark Sanford--the Appalachian Trail hiker and Argentine mistress fucker--was asked by a cable news anchor about the Confederate flag flying in total indifference to the Emancipation Proclamation and Lee's surrender at Appomattox.  Sanford replied, "That opens a Pandora's Box."  In other words, South Carolina's many nostalgic racists must have their feelings respected.
     Anyway, it's preferable for some to believe the killings represent an attack on Christians who happened to be black. 
     I was in South Carolina, a rather beautiful state, in 1999.  My girlfriend and I were headed to a state park near Myrtle Beach where we planned to camp for a few days.  Driving in a rented Dodge Neon on two lane roads, approaching the Ocean, we began to notice the same four-sided yellow roadside sign appearing about every quarter- to half-mile:

          CHURCH

     The shrubs and trees would then give way to a view of a little church.  Then, around a bend or two another sign:

          CHURCH

     This happened at least five times in under two miles.  From this, I concluded that South Carolina is not lacking in churches.  Sixteen years later I heard about a bastard with a gun killing nine in a church attended mainly by black people.  The killer, a self-admitted racist, chose that church to start his "race war," in that city, where the first shots of the American Civil War were fired.
     His dead-eyed face is all over the news.  Is he a domestic terrorist?  Did he have political motives for killing those people?  If he sought to start a race war, then yes.  Were his victims terrorized?  Yes.  Whether or not he'll be declared, like Timothy McVeigh, a domestic terrorist, it's sobering to realize he's managed to kill more Americans than ISIS has thus far.  I regard him as a stone cold murderer who should face a firing squad, but the news media, in their traditional way, has him in another role.  When asked in a courthouse video session whether or not he's employed, the killer replied, "No." 
     The truth is, he's currently employed as a celebrity.

                                                                         Vic Neptune