Kathleen "la zorra estadounidense" Parker has switched in her latest column from invading brown foreign people speaking a funny language to wholesome white guys being persecuted by slutty black women: Rush to judgment at DukeOrlando Sentinel 04/16/06. [01/05/07: New link to column at Jewish World Review.]
And La Zorra is considered a respectable conservative columnist.
The story to which she refers is the accusation that several Duke University lacrosse players raped an exotic dancer. Now, I haven't followed this one. I know Steve Gilliard has been commenting on it. This is why we have courts and trials, so cases like this can be decided based on some kind of legal standard and not based on speculation in the newspapers.
La Zorra begins:
"We don't know all the facts about the alleged Duke lacrosse rape, but . . ."
That's more or less how most commentators have introduced their remarks on the case that has reduced the Durham, N.C., community to prayers, tears and recriminations.
Obviously, La Zorra starts her comments that way, too. But La Zorra doesn't need to make a decision on the facts to know that this is another example of those, you know, minorities doing terrible things to us pore white folks.
La Zorra then offers to translate the secret code for us. That would be the secret code that lets us understand how the Liberal Press is trying to crush Christians and white people even though the unitiated can't tell that's what they're doing.
La Zorra says:
Let me interpret the code for you: Men are bad.
Even though we don't know what happened, we're not going to let the absence of facts interfere with our indictment of a team, a coach, a school, but more to the point - of boys.
About the only thing to emerge with any clarity since a black exotic dancer claimed that three white lacrosse players raped her last month is our willingness to believe the worst about males.
That belief is all the more rewarding if the males happen to be white, as well as athletes, and especially if they're perceived to be privileged. If there's one thing we can't bear in this country, it's spoiled white boys who think the world owes them a good time.
Jeez, and stuff like this gets you a paying job as a syndicated columnist! Who knew there would still be good money to be made by defending the White Master Race in mainstream publications half a century after Brown v. Board of Education?
I haven't researched the lacrosse rape case. And I probably won't. But I can tell from what I have seen that La Zorra is picking up occult signals that us untrained mortals can't detect. So I can respond as a consumer of news, commentary and the occasional piece of propaganda dressed up as respectable-white-lady talk.
Whenever I've heard a report about a rape case, I can't recall ever thinking that the factual news report of the charge or accusation was telling me that "men are bad".
La Zorra says "we" aren't going to let our own absence of knowledge prevent us from making "our" indictment of various people involved. It seems to me that any formal indictments will come from the district attorney. Other "indictments" in the form of criticism can be made. And I know there are questions apart from the truth of the rape charge that raise questions about the proper conduct of people involved.
And apparently, whatever "we" it is to which La Zorra is referring think a news report of a rape case is a coded message from the anti-Christian Liberal Press that says "men are bad". Apparently "we" all think "boys" are bad, too. Aren't "we" talking about a college team here? And most college freshmen are at least 18, which in America makes them adults for all purposes except being able to order a beer in a restaurant.
Oh, I get it: she means they're good ole boys!
Just in case she may have missed some way to refer to the male gender, she goes on to say that "we" are willing "to believe the worst about males". Shoot, I'm willing to believe the worst about pretty much anybody. But I'm also pretty confident in saying that a willingness to consider the possibility that some young white guys might rape a black exotic dancer does not in itself constitute evidence of misanthropy.
And La Zorra huffs indignantly, "If there's one thing we can't bear in this country, it's spoiled white boys who think the world owes them a good time." Dadgum, what's this country coming to? Why does everybody want to pick on spoiled white boys/men/males/whatever "who think the world owes them a good time"? La Zorra obviously knows that spoiled white boys are perfectly entitled to the world providing them a good time! That's what makes America great, isn't it?
La Zorra goes on and on in that same vein. For instance:
Thus, we need little prompting to assume that where there's a guy, there's a potential rapist; where there's an athlete, there's seething brute force; where there's an SUV, there's a privileged, gluttonous, imperialistic brat who deserves to be found guilty, even if he isn't.
I must admit, the concept of "imperialistic brat" is a new one on me.
La Zorra seems to be a committed devotee of the Phyllis Schlafley school of cultural criticism:
The idea that males can't control themselves and that females can't be blamed - ever for anything - has been taking shape in the culture for the past several decades and now is firmly embedded in the zeitgeist. Reaction to Duke's sad chapter is but the inevitable full flowering of the anti-male seeds planted a generation ago.
Females can't be blamed for anything? La Zorra is a nationally syndicated columnist. Surely she could set up a few interviews with divorced men who would be glad to tell her how blameworthy their ex-wives are.
Of course, this is the Phyllis Schlafley line. I remember that during the Reagan administration she testified to Congress that virtuous women never get sexually harassed. If a guy hits on her, she's obviously a slut and it her fault, in this more-than-a-little-perverse way of thinking.
This one is even more disturbing:
That said, it is unsurprising in these bilious times that an athletic team, some of whose members could face very serious charges, would opt for silence, most likely on the advice of attorneys. A mob formed almost instantaneously to condemn the lacrosse players, and, as history has taught us, once a mob gets a whiff of blood, nothing but blood will do.
Seeing as how La Zorra seems to be so sheltered from the real world that she's never heard a married man bitch and moan about an ex-wife, you could almost imagine that she doesn't recognize this kind of talk. But since she pimps the white-supremacist paranoid fantasy about a Mexican "Reconquista", one has to assume she's somewhat familiar with the talk in those circles. So surely she must realize that her line about a mob getting a whiff of blood is a weird, looking-glass version of the typical justification for racial lynch-murders. Only in those cases, it was real mobs that formed, and it was black men who were being accused of some sort of violence against white women or violation of the segregationist sexual code of some kind. Emmitt Till, the African-American kid tortured and drowned in Mississippi in 1954 whose case has been in the news again recently, was accused of being "fresh" with a white girl. As in saying something mildly flirtatious.
And just in case some of her more literacy-challenged fans might have missed that, La Zorra goes back to her mysterious "we":
While we wait to hear what the grand jury decides, we might turn our harsh judgment inward and recognize that the anti-male groupthink that permitted a presumption of guilt in Durham is little different than the lynch-mob mentality that once channeled rage against blacks.
I don't think La Zorra is a particularly nice woman.
