[img]1|left|||no_popup[/img]
Sometimes I wish I had been born black.
The desire re-emerged this morning over the breakfast table.
I was midway through absorbing America’s third-worst newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, which, hopefully, will fail in the not-distant future.
After a Letter to the Editor prodded my desire to change races to re-emerge, there came a separate and encouraging report:
The Times is pondering laying off 75 more persons in editorial. Patrick Frey, over at patterico.com, reacted more gently than I would have: “I feel bad for the individuals,” he wrote, “but I’m too angry to feel bad about the institution. To hell with the institution. They’re busy distorting facts, day in and day out, to torpedo John McCain’s campaign, and I’m supposed to feel bad?”
I, on the contrary, welcome both parcels of news. The layoff targets, you see, are a keen part of the problem. We can’t blame the janitors. These culpable, winking, fundamentally dishonest reporters have brought about a once tolerable newspaper’s scrupulously calculated plunge into disgrace with their daily jacklegged, reliably unreliable writing.
Maybe the hapless layoff targets — who have been comfortable with their reflexive betrayals of honesty, a reporter’s only shield — will sober up and relocate their integrity at their next journalistic stop.
Direct your pity at deserving people, not the entitled journalistic elites who delight in manipulating your mind as if it were silly putty.
The Times’ Supreme Court beat reporter, Davy Savage, wrote a phony story on a disputable topic, Roe v. Wade, for Sunday’s edition, a sin of which every writing member of the Washington bureau, a gang of journalistic goons, is regularly guilty. I should hardly weep if/when Mr. Savage is forced out as the Times continues to shrink. You do not remedy a disease by serving the same poison that caused the problem. Therefore, dishonest Times persons — such as Doyle McManus, Mr. Savage, Peter Wallsten, Jimmy Rainey, Noam Levey — should be picked up by their ears and handcarried to the doorway.
Bitterness Driven by Race
Meanwhile, on the Letters page of their employer, a bitter, provocative and sad missive arrested my attention with his comments on the return of O.J. Simpson to long-tern custody.
“White America,” wrote Russell Givens Jr., of Los Angeles, “are you satisfied? Now Simpson has been found guilty. But is he guilty of attempting to recover his own property, or is he guilty of the murders of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman?
“Simpson is in custody. He may remain in custody for life. I will admit he put himself in this position. But I do not believe that any 12 jurors could fairly debate a charge against him.”
If there is a Mr. Givens, his manicured rant tells us he is quite young, immature, modestly educated, frighteningly angry, almost incurably so, and deeply into lifetime victimology.
This is the analysis of a white man, modestly educated, passionately in love with daily life, almost incurably so.
Had Mr. Givens’ parents been mine, I may have written the same letter to the Times because I, too, would have been poisoned by a deadly blend of near-fatal victimology and smothering entitlement.
As a practitioner of victimology, Mr. Givens believes that while Mr. Simpson murdered two innocent people almost a generation ago, white people are getting their revenge by actually punishing him this time.
Mr. Givens’ unreasoned conclusion, is chokingly pathetic.
Black friends have told me, “Being white, you just don’t — can’t — understand.”
Perhaps if I had been born black, I would have been able to calm his jangled cerebral waters by using a locution that victims-for-life comprehend.
