The Million Man Cigarette and Salt March
In the good old days, when a week
was as full of gossipy news as this one was, I’d head off to the bar near the
National Press Club. There, amid clouds of smoke and the reek of decades of
cheap booze, reporters would sit around and spread the dirt in an atmosphere of
bonhomie. Now, to watch reporters at leisure I have to go to some damned net
cafe where kids fresh out of journalism schools they went to because their
grades in area studies stunk and they wanted “to make a difference” hang out.
So I went to the Fair Trade Shade Grown Beans where they sat around trading
narratives.
It wasn’t a good week for them.
“Campus culture of rape” had taken a body blow when it turned out the claims
against a University of Virginia fraternity gang rape could not be
substantiated; something the Rolling Stone author who first published
the tale might have learned had she or her editors exercised normal
investigative journalism caution. (Lena Dunham’s campus rape story also fell apart.)
Looks like the skeptics or “rape
denialists”, as we are known in certain quarters, proved right.
Should we opt for a therapeutic
approach and justice be damned or do the accused have some rights, too? Tom Maguire explores this notion:
Meanwhile, over at Oberlin John
Nolte of Breitbart News had this exchange with
an administrator denying him access to seemingly relevant records about the
Dunham allegations:
"Asking whether or not a
victim is telling the truth is irrelevant," Ms. Hess
proclaimed. "It's just not important if they are telling the truth. If
this person had wanted criminal justice they would have pursued it."
Hmm. In a slightly different
context, most progressives (and conservatives) are familiar with the voluminous
evidence suggesting that eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable.
Yet when the context shifts to an often young, often intoxicated sexual assault
victim, 100% credulity to what is probably the most traumatic event of their
life is the only acceptable response? That might be an appropriate therapeutic
approach, but it poses a serious conflict with any process of justice that is
oriented towards investigation rather than affirmation. (And let me note that
two Jersey Girls were made of sterner stuff -- their prompt reporting led to
prompt arrests in recent assaults at Ramapo College and William Paterson University, but that is not part of
the "national conversation").
The same tension arises in reporting
on rape allegations. Michael Moynihan at The Daily Beast explains that, yes, journalists actually need to practice
journalism.
Still, as they swigged their decaf
pumpkin spice lattes, the gang at the Fair Trade Shade Grown Beans was not
giving up. “All men are monsters and all fraternities are testosterone filled
torture chambers,” said the gal with the Che Guevara t-shirt and the hammer and
sickle iPad case to a table of her cohorts. “Maybe they just ought to
bring back all single-sex colleges if these are too delicate
flowers," muttered to no one in particular.
Along the wall sat three young men
wearing “Say No to White Privilege”, “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” and Trayvon Martin
hoodies seemed a bit more upbeat. It’s true that despite the race agitators the
Martin case fell apart upon scrutiny and acquittal though the rent seekers and
agitators stick to the story made up by local reports in Florida and the Martin
family supporters, and the Michael Brown shooting didn’t pass judicial scrutiny
either. With good reason,
the jury didn’t share the lynch ‘em approach taken by the Congressional Black
Caucus member Eleanor Holmes Norton that she didn’t care what the facts were.
In any event, with it being obvious
that Brown was a drugged-up felon who beat an officer, tried to grab his gun
and resisted arrest, he was less sympathetic than the false, media-generated
and widely believed tale of Trayvon as a young boy shot by a “racist “ for
wearing a hoodie. Brown’s family was at least as unappealing as Brown, his
stepfather having called for protestors to burn down Ferguson and he and
Brown’s mother having beat up the grandmother who raised Michael because she
was profiting off the sale of Brown t-shirts which they believed they had sole
marketing rights to.
Worse though, this kerfuffle and the
president and attorney general’s perfidious role in stirring up hatred there
seem to be engendering real hate crimes. “This doesn’t look good to the bitter
clingers,” said the reporter in the “Hands Up” t-shirt, pointing to the report
on his iPad that two black men and an Hispanic in St. Louis had beaten to
death with hammers a Bosnian immigrant whose car they were hammering and who had the temerity to
get out of it to protest. “Well," replied the “White Privilege”
fellow, “the police say they couldn’t be sure it was a hate crime.” He clicked
on a Fox report:
Within hours, St. Louis police Chief
Sam Dotson rushed to tell the large Bosnian community there that it was no hate
crime.
"There is no indication that
the gentleman
… was targeted because he was
Bosnian," Dotson said.
Not targeted for being a Bosnian?
Really? As if thugs who'd use hammers to kill a man could find Bosnia on a map.
That song and dance didn’t seem to
have the desired effect of papering over the animus of the crime, because
shortly afterward a black gang brutally assaulted a woman when they found out she was Bosnian and this time the police
chief was forced to change his tune.
“We still have the Garner case,”
said the skinny guy in the faded Trayvon hoodie garb. “Some on the right said
that while they were sorry he died, he had 31 prior arrests and was resisting a
lawful arrest.”
“It’s a bit hard to make this out as
a racist thing though,” said I as I leaned over to engage them. ”The
supervising officer was a black woman and the autopsy indicated he had
preexisting health issues and did not die from a choke hold but of cardiac
arrest on the way to the hospital. In any event this seems more like a question
of overcriminalizing and overtaxing, than it is of racism.” As they looked at
me querulously I explained. “The taxes on cigarettes in NYC are outrageous.
Smokers are desperate. Selling single cigarettes on the street to the poor
seems to be the way around it for people like Garner and his customers .The
more laws like this you pass, the more intrusive you make the cops become and
the more arrests you make the more likely it is that there’ll be unfortunate
deaths like these.”
I don’t think I persuaded them, but
I did get a bright idea: Let’s have a million man smoke in march on NYC, maybe
even with some folks dressed in giant papier mache cigarette packs and salt
shakers. Let’s do our part to stamp out overregulation and taxation. No
Pasaran [More Laws] as we used to say in the Not Friends of the Lincoln
Brigade.
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