Taki Magazine

A recent MALDeafening

by Evan McLaren on May 04, 2009

Last July some drunken teenage football players in the town of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania got into an altercation with an illegal immigrant and damaged him so badly that he soon died. In a verdict handed down on Friday two of the teens were acquitted by a jury.

Gladys Limon of the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund says that the verdict “is a complete outrage. . . . The message the verdict sends is you can kill a person, you can stomp on their head until the person dies, based on their national heritage.”

Were that the case, America’s white society would be a terribly brutal and threatening setting for Hispanic immigrants. Yet Hispanics continue coming in high numbers. That’s merely one reason why a portrait of white society as basically inhospitable would make no sense.

I myself am not sure what message the verdict sends since I haven’t paid close attention to the details and circumstances of the proceeding. It would be hard to know such things without a real knowledge of the people involved, the character of the town, the agendas of the attorneys and judges, and so on. Local and ethnic loyalties may very well have had something to do with the way the case ended up being decided. In that it would have been unremarkable in the scheme of things, though deplorable in itself.

The alleged crime also is unremarkable in an overall sense. Brutal human behavior is not new, and in itself not a sign that we have reached new lows or sighted fresh existential evils.

I have no difficulty believing that the defendants acted aggressively and that their motivation had a racial aspect. Whom would this surprise? The racial tension in our society is palpable and ever-present, and it is not shy about exposing itself in our crime statistics. Those statistics reveal that non-white groups are the major sources of violent crime per capita, not the other way around, and that whites are more likely to be victims—another fact that belies the idea of white society as fundamentally oppressive, exclusive, and unwelcoming.

Again, I don’t pretend to know what the case itself means. On the other hand, the public interpretation of the case is easier to understand. It, too, sends a clear message. The message it sends is that white society is preoccupied with its own guilt, that it is willing and even eager to have itself portrayed as deeply unjust and horribly vicious. It is an example of how willing whites are to dutifully transmit images MALDEF attorneys hold of their society. On the other hand, when a Hispanic murders whitey it’s mostly business as usual, from the standpoint of the academic media priesthood.

Saying something worthwhile about how this guilt complex developed is tricky business. It seems like mostly everything already has been said, and it’s difficult to break new ground with regard to the sources of decay and rot. And obsessing over where the rot came in, exactly, becomes its own obstacle. Not a few right-wing outlets come off as the creations of people who spent their formative years ranting on comment threads against Martin Luther, or William of Ockham, or Alexander Hamilton, or Abraham Lincoln . . . and then started a magazine and started rehashing their rants.

One simply cannot write as if a reversal of our medieval twilight (to borrow a phrase) is within reach. Such a habit ends up reflecting the egalitarian’s approach to history, as something of a revelation that brings reform after reform until, finally, a de-alienated equalitarian satisfaction. Restoration isn’t immanent, so it doesn’t bear immanentizing. The situation is rather more like what Fred Reed says it is, in his farewell column:

The civilizational changes we now see are both irremediable and beyond control. The peasantrification and empty glitter of society, pervasive hostility to careful thought, onrushing authoritarianism, and distaste for cultivation are now endemic. I do not know where these lead, but we are assuredly going to get there. Fuming buys nothing.

In any case, whether it’s ranting against MALDEF or multiculturalism or ranting, I clearly have met my quota for the evening. I retire with a piece of muted satisfaction in mind. News came a few days ago about a muddle-headed black anti-white brute who last fall went ballistic against my old undergraduate political magazine for its alleged “racism,” after a gifted young writer published an argument that ran along the lines of what got Walter Block into trouble at his institution. By talent and capability the critic’s proper station is far below that of undergraduate, and as a member of a college community he was morally malfunctioning citizen. Everyone knew it, and no one said it openly, especially after he went off against the Kenyon Observer like a seventh-rate Malcom X. His chest-thumping attracted the shrill support of a variety of the faculty’s dimmest bulbs. That’s all in the past now, since the little punk got stung in an undercover operation selling weed, which happens to be his primary occupation. My guess is that this only slightly decreases the likelihood that he will obtain a Kenyon degree. That particular detail isn’t my business. And anyway, what does the situation prove, except that we can’t reasonably impose our Euro-centric norms on petty anti-white drug dealers, for whom it can be said we must cultivate a special understanding, a separate structure of academic programming, and perhaps even a new administrative office? Such is the spirit of the tripe broadcasted by the school’s ensconced PC brigade. Personally I’d rather smoke weed with the perp than revisit the characteristic celebrations of our multiculture.

• Print Article
• Email Article
• Email the Editor