…past the graveyard:

…now that “golf” and “Chicago” — along with “Clint,” “Medicare,” “debt,” “jobs,” “foreign policy,” and “quantitative easing” — are all racist code words, are there any words left that aren’t racist? Yes, here’s one:

“Negrohood.”

Not familiar with it? New York Assembly candidate Ben Akselrod used it the other day in a campaign mailout to Brooklyn electors, arguing that his opponent “has allowed crime to go up over 50 percent in our negrohood so far this year.”

Like Messrs. Dunn, Matthews, and O’Donnell, Ben Akselrod is frighteningly pasty white, and a Democrat, and so presumably has highly refined racial antennae. Had a campaign staffer suggested that Mr. Akselrod’s opponent was wont to wear “plus-fours” and had a “niblick,” obviously such naked racism would have been deleted in the first draft. But the more subtly allusive “negrohood” apparently just slipped through.

Mr. Akselrod now says it was a “typo.” Could happen to anyone. You’re typing “neighborhood,” and you leave out the “i,” and the “h” and “b,” and the “o” and “r” get mysteriously inverted. Either that, or your desktop came with Al Sharpton’s spellcheck. And then nobody at the campaign office reading through the mailer spotted it. Odd.

It’s only the beginning of September. So we’ve got two more months of this. I don’t know how it will play in the negrohoods of Chicago — whoops, sorry, I apologize for saying “Chicago” — but let me make a modest observation from having spent much of the last few months traveling round foreign parts. When you don’t have frighteningly white upscale liberals obsessing about the racist subtext of golf, it’s amazing how much time it frees up to talk about other stuff. For example, as dysfunctional as Greece undoubtedly is, if you criticize the government’s plans for public-pensions provision, there are no Chris Matthews types with such a highly evolved state of racial consciousness that they reflexively hear “watermelon” instead of the word “pensions.” So instead everyone discusses the actual text rather than the imaginary subtext. Which may be why political discourse in the euro zone is marginally less unreal than ours right now: At least they’re talking about “austerity”; over here we’re still spending, and more than ever.

One of the encouraging things is that I think the race card has been so overcharged that no one can proffer it up any more, and be taken seriously.