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Friday, April 13, 2007
The Beast Among Us
It can sometimes seem as if the entire nation has turned into a giant sore spot, everyone warily eyeing everyone else, ready to pounce at the merest suggestion of a slur. Most recently, radio personality Don Imus, who's been muddying the airwaves with his treadless, routinely offensive schtick for nearly forty years, has finally gotten into career-ending trouble...by referring to the members of the University of Rutgers Women's Basketball team as "nappy-headed hos." Needless to say, professional race-hustlers such as "Reverend" Al Sharpton immediately went ecstatically ballistic. They've needed a fresh excuse for a pogrom against some white celebrity for a long time now, and Imus gave them exactly what they'd hoped for.
Your Curmudgeon has refrained from commenting on this subject until now because he was thinking about the larger body of ice hidden beneath the visible pinnacle. For this is not, in the customary phrase, an isolated incident. It deserves to be knitted into its proper place in the larger social tapestry.
Victimist politics are not new. We've had endless examples of the use of the "victim card" by minority groups to win all sorts of social and political concessions from persons who've done them no harm whatsoever. Blacks, homosexuals, Hispanics, and Muslims are merely its most visible practitioners. What's new and exciting is the unfriendly eye being cast upon the tactic by a growing number of Americans. What's frightening is the range of possible developments from their evaluations.
Victimism -- roughly, identity politics founded on the promotion of a consciousness of past injustices done by a larger group to a smaller one -- works only when the consciences of those in the larger group have been excessively sensitized to the sins of their ancestors. Quite a number of institutions and mechanisms have labored at this sensitization. They've had more than a little success. In consequence, millions of white Americans flinch at accusations of unfairness toward blacks; millions of heterosexual Americans flinch at accusations of exclusion of homosexuals; millions of "infidel" Americans flinch at accusations of prejudice against Muslims; and so forth ad nauseam. Millions, but not all; an increasing number of us are aware that our hands are clean, and are beginning to get very angry about the ceaseless representations to the contrary.
Therein lie the dangers. False accusations can mobilize the accused to bring them true, and without a shred of regret. "Might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb," as the old saying goes; if you're going to be called a racist, a homophobe, or an imperialist kuffar regardless of what you say or do, you might as well have whatever pleasure is available from being one. A man's conscience can cease to restrain him, if he's prodded too roughly or too long.
Not all the professional grievance-hustlers are too stupid to realize that. Some definitely understand the risks that attend their strategy. But they persist, and at a greater intensity than ever. Why?
Read on.
Consider the recently concluded "Duke Lacrosse" case. Surely you're familiar with the affair: three varsity lacrosse players at Duke University were accused of a host of sexual offenses on the representations of a black stripper who'd been hired to entertain at a party they attended. Just this week, after more than a year on tenterhooks, all the charges against the three young men were dropped. Of course, quite a bit happened in the interim.
The Duke Lacrosse case first became a cause celebre because the accuser, Crystal Gail Mangum, is black and the accused are white. The stereotypical paradigm of privileged white boys assaulting a poor defenseless black woman proved irresistible to the race-hustlers, who leaped on it at once and pounded it for all it was worth. One of those race-hustlers was prosecuting attorney Mike Nifong: a white man.
Here at the conclusion of the affair, the three Duke students have emerged from legal jeopardy while attorney Nifong is deeply mired in it. All the evidence indicates that Nifong knew the three students were utterly innocent virtually from the moment the accusations were made. Yet he pilloried them publicly, conducted a campaign of vilification against them, and even attempted to intimidate witnesses who confirmed their stories with threats of indictment. Given that our forensics have advanced sufficiently far that they could not be convicted on the objective evidence, why did he persist?
Clearly, he thought he could prosper from his campaign, even though his sole asset was that stereotypical narrative of whites abusing blacks. Consciously or otherwise, he'd assessed its intimidating power as being superior to everything else germane to the case.
What's important about Nifong's assessment is not that it was incorrect in this particular case, but that a reasonably bright person should have reached it in the first place. It might have been correct in the majority of instances. It might have sufficed to send three other young men to prison for the rest of their natural lives. It might have catapulted Nifong into the Governor's Mansion and turned Crystal Gail Mangum into yet another hero of the Left, to stand beside Rosa Parks and Anita Hill in their pantheon of Noble Opponents of the Privileged Establishment.
Mike Nifong chose to ride the coattails of black victimism on the strength of its record of successes to date -- a record white Americans created by internalizing a guilt virtually no American alive today truly deserves.
In some circles, any departure whatsoever from black victimist cant will get you labeled a racist. Similarly, any divergence from feminist victimist cant will get you labeled a sexist; any disagreement with homosexual victimist cant will get you labeled a homophobe; any quibble with Muslim victimist cant will get you labeled an Islamophobe; and so forth. These words and their implications have acquired immense power over the minds of innocent men, not because the sins they imply are real or widespread, but because we fear that we'll be ostracized for having been so labeled.
Your Curmudgeon is convinced that in due course such vilifications will be generically detoxified. However, given the great value of these slurs to those who routinely hurl them, the process is not guaranteed to run all the way to completion in anyone's lifetime. More, the grievance-mongers are fantastically active among those they claim to represent, straining to stoke as much rage and sense of entitlement unjustly denied as they can. Clearly, their assessment of their prospects differs from that of your Curmudgeon. Yet we're looking at the same tableau; how do we reach obviously different conclusions?
In part, it's because the grievance-mongers have had the major institutions of education and information on their side for many years. The hypersensitivity that supports victimist identity politics was a consequence of being relentlessly propagandized into it by our government-run schools, our higher academic institutions, and the major media. While these were the sole conduits for the formation of minds, they were all but invincible. It took a very powerful, utterly self-assured mind to withstand their assaults.
Another element in the development has been the retreat from assimilation. In the Fifties and Sixties, when the seeds of victimist politics were sown, there was general concurrence that America's minorities wanted to be accepted into the mainstream of American life -- that they wanted to emphasize their commonalities with white, heterosexual, Judeo-Christian Americans rather than their divergences. Blacks merely wanted to integrate, homosexuals merely wanted to live without harassment, Hispanics merely wanted to work and prosper, and there weren't enough Muslims to matter. This implied a desire for good will among men, an assumption which disarmed the majority for the thrusts to come.
Things are a bit different today. The proliferation of alternate avenues of communication, education, and entertainment has severely undermined the grievance-mongers' hegemony over the American conscience. The explosion in the publishing world, which hasn't been so diverse since Gutenberg, has played a large part. Ordinary persons who've long suspected that there was nothing wrong with them for taking note of objective differences among the races, the sexes, the ethnic cultures, the creeds, and so on are finding and drawing reassurance from one another. They've compared notes about minorities' observable tendency toward voluntary re-segregation, and the hardening of the victimist communities against all suggestions that their license to whine has expired. The grievance-hustlers haven't yet adjusted to the new state of affairs.
The response of the victimists has been, in the main, to press harder. Most especially, they've striven to maintain linguistic taboos that operate in their favor. They sense that free communication is their principal enemy, so they do all they can to quell it.
Your Curmudgeon is persuaded that the victimists don't have enough current influence or power to subjugate us irreversibly before the Baby Boom generation and its hypersensitized conscience passes from the scene. Perhaps we agree on that, for they certainly seem to be in a hurry lately.
We return to Don Imus and his "nappy-headed hos." Why was this such an incitement to black victimists? Surely far worse has been said about blacks and is still being said, by persons whose IQs are well above room temperature. So why, when a sensible, secure, non-confrontationally-inclined Negress would have said, "Hey, Imus is just a vulgar jerk whose only audience is other vulgar jerks. The hell with him," even if she were the center on the Rutgers women's basketball team, did Imus tick them off so?
Short answer: He didn't.
For a movement to triumph from a position of numerical minority and nominal political weakness is not unknown. However, there are preconditions. The most important of these is a loss of moral and ethical confidence by the majority, without which it cannot resist a determined attack. This is entirely consistent with the victimists' mode of assault on our consciences. Given the recent diminution of the tactic's power, it also explains why they've increased the tempo of their campaigns. They know they have to win while their whip still cuts.
It is possible that the victimists' greatest obstacle is the refusal to follow them by the majority of those they claim to represent. They who have integrated, have adopted the majority's public and domestic norms, and have made their peace with those of other creeds are uninterested in strife. Even those who hold that significant pockets of majority maltreatment of their identity group still exist are indisposed to risk what they've striven for. Success has turned them conservative.
Thus, the victimist leaders are backed by minor fractions of minority populations. The odds are heavily against them in the long term; if they're to achieve any further success, it must be immediately. The beast is wounded and senses that defeat is imminent; if its next sallies don't win, it must accept defeat, at least for the foreseeable future. This, and no other, is the reason why the race-hustlers are leaning so heavily on a dismissible-if-offensive comment by a marginal radio personality with insignificant influence, who was shortly to fade from the scene no matter what he said or did.
There's infinitely more to say on this topic, and in due course your Curmudgeon will say it, but for now...
More anon.
Comments
The beast will never accept defeat. It must be killed or permanently banished.
In either case, things will get bloody.
M
Posted by Mark Alger on 04/13/2007 at 11:26 PMHave you seen any of Jeff Goldstein’s pieces about identity politics over at Protein Wisdom? If not, you might find them well worth reading.
Posted by on 04/15/2007 at 12:17 AM
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