Trial by candlelight vigil is a bad sign if you are the defendant. It signifies the class warriors are on the move, seeking blood vengeance on behalf of victims in the name of abstract social justice. With placards and tapers in hand - and the lap-dog mass media poised—the politically righteous seek blood revenge on behalf of victims everywhere.
Defendants, labeled as elitists who exploit the “unenabled,” are immediately pronounced guilty in class warfare, marked for execution, their role in any particular incident secondary to the drive to “eliminate” enemies of the people. Someone being actually proved guilty by due process is not the point.
Over in Durham, the class warriors were ready. Drawing from experience on campus in the ’60s and ’70s, the old activists and race warriors felt a stirring in their bellies and hit the streets to lynch the lacrosse players from Duke for crimes against womanhood—not specifically against the stripper who reported she was raped by the athletes, but on behalf of all women–most notably black women. In their world-view, it’s one more skirmish in the ongoing exploitation of women by chauvinist male pigs. The intensity of battle escalated when the enemy was identified as white prep school boys with wealthy parents.
The events in Durham are a local production of an ongoing universal passion play, produced and directed by the righteous to provide a moral lesson to the rest of us. The plot is always the same: The world is controlled by male, fat-cat white owners of the means of production who have their way by exploiting the weakness of the working class, women and minorities. The drama is mounted when the latest victim appears in the news. The chorus of activists shouts down the facts and pleads with the audience to sympathize with the plight of the downtrodden, emphasizing their only crime was to be born poor, female, black or gay. The victim-heroes can falsely accuse defendants, commit crimes, lie, cheat, steal and murder. But they are innocent in the context of their victimization.
They and the media poodles are fully aware that an early news report clings to the accused closer than a police file. Actual verdicts down the road that could clear a defendant are given short shrift. By labeling them guilty, no matter the outcome from due process, they are able to supersede in the public mind the bothersome process of a trial and verdict by judge or jury. It’s part of the strategy to “name ‘em and stain ‘em”.
Right on cue, the white male villains were tried and sentenced on the front page of newspapers and across TV screens worldwide. As far as anyone could tell, the lacrosse players were rapists, college sports an orgy of violence and sexual depredation and Duke University a dangerous place to send your kids to school. In this familiar recurring act in the politically correct passion play, punishment by accusation trumps the legal system. The lacrosse players, and college sports, are guilty until proved innocent. The player/students are stained for life, labeled as rapists by mob rule. If the courts try them and find them innocent, it makes no difference. The damage is done. The headlines worldwide tried and sentenced them all in the first act.
STARRING ROLES
The dramatis personae in the Duke/Lacrosse/Black Female Stripper passion play do not elicit sympathy from the audience. The District Attorney appears to be exploiting the case in time for the May political primaries, while reacting to the peculiar gyrations of Durham’s class structure. He landed indictments with scant evidence, relying on the word of an unstable victim to appease the mob, in full knowledge he was staining the defendants for life.
The players are cocky and contemptuous of the rules most people have to obey. They lord around the campus and town unencumbered by the need to conform to the rules of society. The alleged victim, a stripper with two illegitimate children, a police record and a life characterized by bizarre behavior—perhaps induced by mental disorders or self-administered—is the heroine only by class-struggle fiat, not by her own lights. The Raleigh daily paper indicted the lacrosse players in splashy fashion for their past crimes, a typical ploy in class warfare. The charges included urinating in public, drinking underage and DWI - hardly crimes against humanity. In comparison, hidden in a longer piece, was a recitation of the rather more serious arrest record of the victim.
The award for worst supporting actor goes to the new president of Duke. He came from Yale, where athletics are not even on the back-burner. Inexperienced in the behavior of athletes, he acted in a cowardly manner by calling for the resignation of the lacrosse coach and suspending the sport before he knew what actually happened. Establishing five “committees” to investigate where Duke went wrong is the refuge of the hapless academic who can’t cope. He should resign for abandoning the players and the University – and for not clinging to the high moral ground of due process. Instead, he leaped to politically correct conclusions under pressure from the chorus of the righteous zealots.
The setting for the passion play is Durham, considered a badly managed city known for crime and corruption. The one counterforce to this sad reality is Duke University, one of the highest ranked colleges in the world. Duke hosts first-class medical facilities, research firms and ancillary institutions that generate, according to a recent report, an economic impact of $3.2 billion a year to the city and county. The Durham actors in the incident have now risked the good relations between gown and town by unfurling their true colors: a mean-tempered population of activists just waiting for a chance to attack the Duke “elitists”.
Venerated black scholar John Hope Franklin should not have been surprised to hear “I hate Duke” from friends in Durham. Black activists are labeling the incident as a “black-white thing”, maintaining the “alleged” victim (as she is called now that proof of her allegations evaporates) is “about being a young mother.” On cable news, the legal talking heads are “praying for the young lady” and could care less about the injustice to the defendants who appear more and more to be victims themselves, nailed to the cross of politically correct class warfare.
The Duke family relocated Trinity College from near Reidsville to Durham, planting the seeds of the present-day Duke University. The school should consider moving again in light of the attitudes expressed recently by residents. Students and faculty want to come to Duke, but not to Durham.