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May 13, 2007

"One of the deepest human passions is the urge to self-righteous pontification"

In fact, the Duke lacrosse case showed a number of things. Yes, there was the issue of the disgraced District Attorney Michael Nifong running amok, suppressing evidence and cynically bartering the lives of three white lacrosse players in his populist bid to win reelection in racially divided Durham. Nifong was certainly part of that “tragic rush to accuse.” As was Syracuse University, which decided not to accept as transfers any students from the Duke lacrosse team--not just the three accused chaps, mind you, but anyone contaminated by having played lacrosse for Duke.

But there are at least two other aspects of the case that deserve comment. One is the role of the media, which with few exceptions descended on the story like Lord Byron’s fabled Assyrian and his cohorts pursuing the destruction of Sennacherib. Oh, how The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and countless other bastions of liberal self-satisfaction loved it! Race. Class. Sex. Victimhood. It was the perfect morality tale. Those white jocks at “the Harvard of the South” just had to be guilty. And what a good time we were all going to have lacerating the malefactors while at the same time preening ourselves on our own superior virtue!

The editorials, the op-eds, the comments, the analyses poured forth non-stop, demonstrating that one of the deepest human passions is the urge to self-righteous pontification. The novelist Allan Gurganis epitomized the tone in an op-ed last April: “The children of privilege,” he thundered, “feel vividly alive only while victimizing, even torturing.” You don’t say? Even sports writers got into the act. Selena Roberts located Duke University “at the intersection of entitlement and enablement, … virtuous on the outside, debauched on the inside.” In August, as Nifong’s case was betraying worrisome fissures, the Times published a 7,000-word article arguing--“praying” might be a more apposite term—that, whatever weaknesses there might be in the prosecution’s case, “there is also a body of evidence to support [taking] the matter to a jury.” As the Times columnist David Brooks ruefully noted after the tide had turned, the campaign against the athletes had the lineaments of a “witch hunt.”
. . .
What a travesty.

"Regardless of the ‘truth’," by The New Criterion, May 2007

Posted at May 13, 2007 04:07 PM | Categories: America

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