It’s open season against whites over here. A couple of weeks ago, an 18-year-old freshman at Rutgers University jumped off the George Washington Bridge after his roommate, also 18, and a female student accomplice used a webcam to film him surreptitiously in a gay sexual encounter and send it to their closest thousand friends. Tyler Clementi’s body was fished out a week later, after the cheap laughs had subsided. Clementi was a top violinist and was studying music. He came from a closely knit family, which is obviously devastated.
The story made the news but the perpetrators were not treated as the monsters they are because — yes, you guessed it — Clementi was white and Catholic, while his roommate, Dharun Ravi, was from the subcontinent and quite brown. His accomplice, Molly Wei, is oriental. Clementi was shy, a top student and quiet. Ravi is a troublemaker and a wise guy, and the Chinese a dragon woman. I might be overcooking my case but I got the distinct impression that talking heads on TV and newspaper columnists did not share my outrage. The other way round would have been very different. The perpetrators would have been thrown into jail and the prosecutors would have demanded 20 years at least. (The university has not even suspended the ghastly duo.)
A bit further west, in Pennsylvania, things are different. In July 2008, a 16-year-old and an 18-year-old, both Polish Americans and high-school football players, had words with a Mexican while celebrating in a bar after a football game. Insults were exchanged and the Mexican was told to go back where he came from. ‘This is America,’ yelled the 16-year-old, Brandon Piekarsky. A fight began and the illegal Mexican was punched, fell to the ground and hit his head. He died a couple of days later. The two teenagers were arrested, tried and a jury found them innocent of murder but guilty of manslaughter. That’s when the Feds stepped in and ordered the case retried, this time as a hate crime. The original verdict angered Hispanic advocacy groups, and a campaign began using all the usual methods. In the second trial both young men were found guilty of using ethnic slurs. They now face sentences of up to life in prison and the second man, Derrick Donchak, an extra 20 years for obstruction of justice and five years for conspiracy. Which means they will be in for life and a bit more.
Now I ask you. The poor Mexican’s death is a tragedy, but when was the last time teenagers got drunk after a football match and got into a fight and did not hurl ethnic insults? Even worse is the fact that the two were railroaded in a trial that amounted to double jeopardy — being tried twice for the same crime. The state found them guilty of manslaughter and the government was dissatisfied with the verdict. Hispanic groups are cheering and bringing down the rafters. No columnist or TV personality has dared point out the outrageousness of this case.
Covertly recording one’s gay roommate as he is having sex — and sharing the video with everyone — is so typical of America today. Kids watch TV programmes which use the trash talk and violence demanded by marketing strategists. Vulgar, drug-fuelled, crotch-centric garbage is the norm. Dirty jokes, incivility and mean-spirited putdowns is the new funny. Good old Britain is not far behind. Just look at that awful Brand fellow, the one who telephoned a grandfather and left him a message that he had slept with his granddaughter. This same pig is now revealing details of his liaison with the divine Kate Moss. A gent of the old school, as my father used to say in such cases.
So there you have it. There is a growing sense of entitlement and of dependency by the so-called minorities, one egged on by the government, whereas on the part of the white population there is resentment and distrust. Too many white folk, as the idiotic George W. Bush called them, think that everyone’s on the fiddle except for themselves. There is an election coming up and the media are obsessed with such folk, the tea partiers. Congress is a forum for legalised bribes, and lawmakers are putting what they see as social justice before liberty. A commentator recently wrote that Americans may seem happy and successful on the outside, ‘but are leading lives of quiet desperation’. He was quoting John Cheever, I believe, who wrote about small-town dwellers and suburbia. If it is John Cheever who said it, I do not agree. His life was certainly a desperate one, as he fought his acute alcoholism and closet homosexuality most of his adult life. (Not that closeted, mind you, as Cheever openly fell in love with men, had affairs with them, told everybody including his own family about them, then pronounced himself 100 per cent heterosexual.) I’ve always found the suburbs to be great: grey-flannel suits and all that, white picket fences and sport galore. It is Washington that is rotten to the core, and the so-called élite in the media and the academy who rail against the so-called tea partiers and young men like the two Polish–American youths whose lives are now destroyed for ever. People in middle America are not as spiritually stunted as the New York Times makes them out to be. They do watch very bad television for far too long, but even that’s better than reading that old hag and her slanted and stunted opinions. Time for radical change.
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