The more things change ...
It’s been a bad couple of weeks for the liberals’ narrative outlook on life. One after another of their favorite genres has blown up in their faces as they have been caught telling and promoting stories that were too good to be true.
There was the gender-based theme, as the Rolling Stone tale of the horrendous gang rape at the University of Virginia went the way of the Duke lacrosse story — an elaborate hoax put on by the self-styled victim with no connection whatever to fact. A feminist student complained that "to let fact-checking define the narrative" would be a "mistake." But a narrative without facts is simply a fiction and a lie that does damage to innocent people.
Damage to innocents is seldom a problem for the drivers of narratives, but it is for the people they hope to win over. This is a loss for the sisters in their war on the war against women, coming on top of the midterm elections. We can call this strike one.
There was no fact-checking around Ferguson, Mo., in August, because the story itself was so good. A 300-pound thief who picked a fight with a cop was turned into a "child" who was cruelly gunned down by a Bull Connor cutout. The incident became the excuse to loot and burn buildings, and then the excuse for the underemployed in large urban centers to lie down in crosswalks and block major arteries.
Six academics set upon two cops on the Brooklyn Bridge on Dec. 13 and broke the nose of one officer, as Columbia University graduate student Cindy Gorn and Rutgers-educated Spanish instructor Zachary Campbell tried to prevent the arrest of one Eric Linsker, a Baruch College professor and poet who was trying to drop a 50-pound garbage can on the officers’ heads. Isn’t it nice when intellectuals take an interest in local community matters? They have so much to contribute, what with their perspective and all.
Alas, this narrative of a racist police force suppressing "the other" exploded for good on Dec. 20, when two officers, Hispanic and Asian, were shot in their patrol car, mourned by the police and most of the city, and memorialized in a press conference translated in Spanish and attended by people of varying colors whose demeanor was a lot more refined than that of the protest community. The narrative may now never recover, mourn the liberal bloggers, varied race hustlers and many people at NBC News.
This has happened before. In the late 1960s, the last time students and faculty were this full of themselves, they succeeded in electing a lot of Republicans. They gave their own bete noir, Richard M. Nixon, his long deferred and soon squandered wish to be president. As Michael Barone writes in his book Our Country, "Some cheered the springtime rebels as demonstrations broke out in April and May 1969 at Harvard, the City College of New York, and San Francisco State College. Others cheered San Francisco State’s president, the beret-capped semanticist S.I. Hayakawa, as he climbed on the top of a student sound truck and pulled the plugs."
Steven F. Hayward quotes Diana Trilling expressing dismay at the boost the riots gave then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, whose approval ratings in 1969 would nearly reach 80 percent. "Every time he shakes his finger at one of those mobs," a supporter told Newsweek, "it gets him 10,000 votes." The next year, voters would re-elect him by a nice, healthy margin — and would elect Republicans as president for 20 of the next 24 years.
No comments:
Post a Comment