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Entry: Cowards, Bullies, and Killers Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/cowards_bullies_and_killers#1078 Post contents: Great article, but I do quibble with its more-masculine-than-thou tone. I'm not going to say it was ever easy to be like Audie Murphy, but surely it was less difficult in a society where his behavior was lauded. Today, his behavior would be condemned as sociopathic, and he'd be whisked off to serve a multi-year sentence at some prison with a (perhaps well-deserved) reputation for homosexual gang rape. Under circumstances such as those, perhaps even Audie Murphy himself would have been inclined to tone it down a notch or three. I was born into this society, and I've never cared for a great many aspects of it, but I've certainly had no viable choice in the matter, short of suicide. The author, I suspect, belongs to the generation that permitted things to get this way. Forgive us young fellows for being remiss in our duty to undue the errors that were imposed on us shortly after we escaped the womb. If I had no criminal record and I, a working class White man in the contemporary USA, layed a hand on a Black dude, for nearly any reason, my life would, after all, be effectively over. I would be charged with a hate crime, invariably convicted (Has any White man charged with a hate crime been acquitted, anywhere, worldwide?), and rendered effectively unemployable hence forth (no one hires people who commit hate crimes, a fact I can personally testify to, as I have been convicted of one of these offenses, and now no one will hire me anywhere, not even at McDonalds, over seven years after being released from jail). Maybe those earring-in-the-nose guys at Kinko's were cowards, but when a gun is being held to your head, even if only figuratively, few people are likely to exemplify the manly virtues (especially over a few sheets of paper). I once almost tripped a (Black) shoplifter who was being pursued by a group of Tower Records employees. It would have been very easy to do, and he would have gone down hard and been taken into custody, and I really wanted to do it. But I didn't, because I knew society, shaped by those who came before me, would not sympathize with an Irishman over a Black, irrespective of who was objectively in the right. I'd have likely gotten sued for helping to enforce the criminal law, no doubt by some ACLU lawyer empowered to service indigent criminal clients by virtue of the trust fund bequeathed to him by his parents, so I declined to do the righteous and manly thing. Those who allowed my generation to be placed in Politically Correct, emasculated captivity, should not, from their no doubt privileged and lofty perches, condemn we captives for having a captive's mentality. We're just trying to survive in the Gulag-Without-Walls we got born into. Tough guys in modern America can go to Iraq, to prison, or fade away into unemployable obscurity. I wonder just how tough the author would have been had he been forced to grow up under such a miasma of Politically Correct tyranny. Sent at: 2008 10 07