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Tuesday, April 11, 2006
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A Note on Duke Lacrosse Fellow bloggers and readers have been generous in praising my coverage of the Duke scandal, and I’m very grateful. I haven’t said much about the story for a few days, and I want to say why. From the outset, I said this thing is extremely complicated (its complications are best chronicled by my fellow blogger Chris at Signifying Nothing -- he’s right there in Durham, a visiting faculty member at Duke), that there are dizzying numbers of participants and informants and forms of evidence involved, and that just getting to a reasonably plausible sequence of events for that night is going to be insanely difficult. Deepening this complexity are the now well-aired class and race issues, in which even if no sexual assault took place, the very fact of rich white Dukies -- teenagers -- using poorer black Durhamites as variants of sexual slaves is disgusting. Yet more broadly, American hyperaffluence and its pathologies -- here among the drunken obnoxious entitled young -- have been put on vivid display and roused complicating emotions from onlookers. Americans, thank goodness, don’t have the reflexive resentment of wealth that many non-Americans do. Most of us have no problem with wealth (many of us are ourselves pretty well off, after all), but when it seems excessive, and excessively irresponsible and arrogant, we can be made to feel indignant. Our basic sense of justice and fair play, our meritocratic attitudes, can only be offended so often before we begin to growl. Take, for instance, Americans’ attitudes toward lobbyists. At GWU today, there was a panel discussion on lobbying, mainly involving lobbyists attempting to put a good face on their currently disgraced profession. They were not happy when a journalist on the panel piped up. …Jeffrey Birnbaum, The Washington Post’s lobbying columnist, was not …diplomatic. When the moderator asked panelists to tee off on their least favorite provisions in congressional lobbying-reform bills, Birnbaum took the opportunity to criticize corporate power. “I guess it’s my job to be the skunk at the garden party,” Birnbaum said. Lobbying scandals “remind the American people how much they dislike organizations that are wealthy enough to buy their way in.” Americans don’t like patently unfair advantages related to the possession of lots of money. Likewise, they don’t like what the Duke lacrosse players seem to represent along these lines (and, again, the story is sufficiently complex that this may be an entirely unfair reading of many of the players) -- people who don’t seem to have much sense of morality, but who are lionized and promoted through life because of their athletic prowess and their money. We already know that quite a few on the Duke team have been lawless, their lawlessness overlooked by a school that wants a winning team. So unfortunately for the Duke players, they’re already disliked by most of the people following this story (obviously the McFadyen email didn’t help, though I actually think too much has been made of this idiotic missive) because of their almost too-perfect symbolism of trends in our rich country that we find unsettling. Yet it could be the case that they’re all perfectly innocent of anything other than the disgusting but not illegal act (far as I know) of hiring a stripper and having a nasty tussle with her when she disappointed them in some way. Could be they’re guilty of assault but not sexual assault. Could be they’re guilty of nothing. In any case, the story continues, and becomes more complex, as the boys’ powerful teams of attorneys get going, etc. We’re in for a long season of claims and counterclaims and shockers and snoozers. I’ll cover as much of this as seems appropriate (keeping in mind that the focus of this blog is university life), but I thought now would be a good time to issue a general statement about the case. |