Heinrich Himmler was a chicken farmer before he became a  leading light of Hitler's racist, murderous  Nazi regime. The recent flurry of American films and plays about American Slavery have cast all slaveholders as Himmler's demented heirs: mad, mean,  and demented chicken farmers. Alas, these Millennial attempts to explain or contextualize American Slavery fail to explain the American Goebbels; those  intellectuals who supported, enhanced and presided over slavery. Goebbels was no chicken farmer; he held a   Doctorate from the University of Heidelberg in Philosophy. Yet there he was, complicit in the chicken farmer's mass murder and the failed painter's genocide.  None of the Millennial attempts, to address American Slavery, offer up an explanation of how a peculiar institution could survive 240 years, being administered by chicken farmers. One film tried and succeeded, in explaining the survival of American Slavery,MANDINGO. It did that service by highlighting the s

The great schism in the American body politic about guns, gun violence and mass shootings began on December 7, 1993; when, a Jamaican immigrant, Colin Ferguson, got    on the  subway     at the Flatbush Avenue Station in Brooklyn. He took that train to the Jamaica stop, and changed trains, boarding the Long Island Railroad,    heading east. He was carrying a Ruger P89 semi automatic pistol. And 160 rounds of ammunition.   "As the train approached the  Merillon Avenue station  in  Garden City Park ,  Long Island , Ferguson drew the gun, dropped several cartridges on the ground, stood up, and opened fire at random. During the next three minutes, he killed six people and injured another nineteen. Some passengers mistook the gunshots for caps or fireworks until a woman shouted, "He's got a gun! He's shooting people!"  Ferguson walked east (forward) on the train, pulling the trigger steadily about every half second. Several passengers tried to hide beneath their seats