Wednesday March 28, 2012

GOLDBERG ALWAYS MAKES IT WORSE. I hate to return at all to the highly depressing topic of Trayvon Martin, but it's never over until the fat laddy sings, so Jonah Goldberg's contribution must be noted. While the rest of the rightwing Ooga Booga squad, including Goldberg's teammates at National Review, pump the theme that because Martin smoked some weed and skipped school he probably deserved to be gunned down, Goldberg, showing that his stupidity sometimes trumps his laziness, goes for the angle shot: The problem, he tells us, is rich black people.

But what if we extend Charles Murray’s argument in Coming Apart to blacks in the top 2% — like Blow, Britt and most of the other black commentators out there. It seems plausible that at least some of these people are as removed from lower class black America as many white commentators are from lower class white America.

I pause here to imagine Goldberg getting a local bag-boy to take his Bubble Quiz for him and later, when he finds out the bag boy didn't know anything about NASCAR either, bursting into the supermarket to demand his money back, and to pick up three pounds of onion dip.

In that context, I could see how the Trayvon Martin story would hit closer to home than the vastly more numerous tragedies involving black-on-black homicide. The richest and most successful African-Americans spend a lot more time in elite “white” America than they do in Compton or East St. Louis. And, my hunch is, they’re more understandably more worried about white men with guns than they are about guns in their kids’ private schools.

But if black-on-black crime is the real issue, then why are they worried about white men with guns at all? Is it because these denatured two-percenter blacks, who don't know Compton and East St. Louis as well as Goldberg knows the mean streets of Scarsdale, have lost or never acquired the mystical ability of their lesser-born brothers to face down even gun-toting white men by yelling "Shaka Zulu" or something? (And they'd have to worry about this because you never know when someone will discover they got high and skipped school, rendering them fair game for any cracker with a firearm?)

But clearly, the fact that their kids go to private school renders their arguments hypocritical; those crests they put on their jackets render them bullet-proof, and Lord knows no one ever got called a nigger who was wearing a button-down shirt.

I do know this: I've read Charles Blow's column, and judging from Goldberg's response to it he either hasn't read it or can't read at all. I am open to either possibility.

I also think it’s a lot easier for rich black liberals to have an “honest conversation” about white racism than it is for them to engage in an honest conversation about the other problems facing black America that have little to nothing to do with white racism.

Goldberg's idea of an honest conversation being the rich black liberals going "homina homina homina" while Goldberg breaks to them the shocking facts of black-on-black crime. I hope that's what it is, anyway; maybe Goldberg, emboldened by this fantasy, will wander over to Harlem and try this gambit on a random group of corner-hangers. It should increase his stock of evidence.

I don’t think this explains everything, not even close. But I do think it might be one of the factors at work.

Or: "Yeah, it's bullshit, but I haven't written much of anything for weeks and K-Lo was threatening not to restock the snack machine."  (Alternatively: Faarrrrrt.)

UPDATE. Goldberg continues making everything worse with his longer column version on Wednesday:

Weak-tea Marxist rants about a system that parasitically feeds off black men sound absurdly antiquated when that system is run, at the top, by black men (Eric Holder, let’s not forget, runs the Justice Department).

By the same token, we could say that Americans have no reason to complain about the Obama Administration, since Obama and Holder and all the rest of them are Americans. (I'm kidding, of course; conservatives don't consider Democrats Americans.)

The rest is just more shit about how black people should listen to him and Heather Mac Donald and all the other honkeys about how to fix their black crime problem, a program that begins with treating incidents like this one as a Mulligan owed to white people.