Ordinarily, I prefer to write essays dealing with the sweeping “big picture,” rather than get bogged down with the minutiae of the daily political “who-struck-John.” But in this instance, I felt so compelled to address the details of a specific case that I actually broke down and wrote to the editors of Reader’s Digest. In the September issue of 2007, on page 186, in an article entitled “Presumed Guilty,” the magazine presented the disgraceful case of the abuse of the Duke University lacrosse team by the system. Here is the response that I sent to Reader’s Digest:
Thank you for having the courage to publish the details of such a blatant example of the true horrors of reverse-discrimination, in the travesty perpetrated upon the members of the Duke University lacrosse team. Your most telling sentence was that the disgracefully unsupportive faculty had been “…trained to consider American society deeply flawed….” Even when I was a college student back in the 1970s, college professors had an unfortunate reputation as ivory-tower, no-concept-of-reality, idealistic dreamers. Have they learned nothing in all of these decades? At the very least, that shameful faculty owes those innocent boys and their loyal coach a public apology for having stereotyped them. And the conniving, treacherous young woman with the desire to “…get paid by the white boys…,” who filed the false accusation, belongs in jail.
So extremely pipe-dream, wishful-thinking, head-in-the-clouds-oriented was the reputation of college professors in the 1970s, that many of my parents’ friends wondered aloud if my parents were sure that they even wanted to send me to college. The friends asked if my family really wished to further my higher learning at the probable expense of my common sense. I was quite proud, then, that my parents responded, “She’s well-grounded in her common sense. She won’t waver.” I was indeed firmly and securely anchored…thanks to them. But I, too, had heard of the university-liberal-propaganda-machine, with its warped vision of reality, which typically brainwashed students and turned out graduates who were consistently more liberal than when they’d gone into the place. And as a student in one such institution, I saw the fanciful-farcical-fairy-tale-preaching for myself. However, in my case, it gave me a good laugh, because I could see so clearly how transparent and shallow and contrived it all was, and instead of being subverted, I emerged even more conservative than I’d gone into it. But then, I had had a strong patriotic background. My maternal grandfather had fought in the Army in World War I; in World War II, my father had served in the Air Force, and my uncle in the Navy. And then came my spoiled, rebellious generation that burned draft cards, burned campuses, and burned bras, …while I burned with shame.
Of course, college professors were hardly the only source of liberal propaganda in the ‘70s. The most pervasive and far-reaching was television, and most particularly anything that emerged from the horribly-biased mind of Norman Lear. Like most families, we watched “All In The Family,” because it was shocking and noisy and often uproariously funny. But, it was also so tilted in one political direction, that it infuriated us almost as often as it amused us. Now if Lear had not been so immersed in his own agenda, if he had created a fair, equal-time show that had pitted evenly-matched opponents, it would have been far more interesting and valuable. Both political extremes, conservatives and liberals, have their share of intelligent people, stupid people, and everything else in between the two. But Lear was infinitely one-sided, and he put a relatively high-IQ but inexperienced ivory-tower airhead up against an uneducated, low-IQ bumpkin, for maximum fireworks…but not for maximum-quality presentation of the issues. Archie Bunker was the ultimate stereotype, and created by a man who claimed to deplore stereotyping. My poor frustrated father got so tired of yelling, “Yes, Arch, you’re right, but for all of the wrong reasons, you dumb-*ss!” Understandably, he wanted our side presented equally well in the debate. As I think back, I would like to see modern, joyfully politically-incorrect, tell-it-like-it-is Carlos Mencia (of the “Mind Of Mencia”) take on someone like Meathead Mike Stivic; now that would be something to see!
In any case, I am grateful to Reader’s Digest for bringing the Duke University travesty out in the open. One could read plenty about the case on Yahoo News (or anywhere else) when there was still a chance that the boys could be “proven” guilty. But from the moment that they were shown to be innocent, the reporting of this case all just suddenly dried up and drained away; the liberal-biased-media certainly was not going to follow up on it. My husband assures me that the only reason that he was made aware of the details of the tail-end of the case as it happened was through conservative-talk-radio, whose only listeners consist of those already convinced in conservatism. Commentators like Rush Limbaugh only get to “preach to the choir,” as it were. Mainstream society is generally gullible enough to succumb to anything dished out by the aforementioned liberal media. So again, thank you, Reader’s Digest, for bringing this case to the attention of the more mainstream readers, and for not letting this shameful business just get swept under the proverbial rug.
I even forgive the magazine for not publishing my letter-to-the-editor in any subsequent issue. As I told my husband, I knew from the moment that I dared to employ the phrase, “reverse discrimination,” that there wasn’t a chance of a snowball on Venus that Reader’s Digest would dare to publish my letter.
However, here on my website, it stands.
