We try to keep our eyes peeled for interesting insights into the Duke lacrosse scandal. So I was glad to see this excellent piece in the New Criterion. Many aspects of the scandal deserve obloquy:
“One is the role of the media, which with few exceptions descended on the story like Lord Byron’s fabled Assyrian and his cohorts pursuing the destruction of Sennacherib. Oh, how The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and countless other bastions of liberal self-satisfaction loved it! Race. Class. Sex. Victimhood. It was the perfect morality tale. Those white jocks at ‘the Harvard of the South’ just had to be guilty. And what a good time we were all going to have lacerating the malefactors while at the same time preening ourselves on our own superior virtue!
“The editorials, the op-eds, the comments, the analyses poured forth non-stop, demonstrating that one of the deepest human passions is the urge to self-righteous pontification. The novelist Allan Gurganis epitomized the tone in an op-ed last April: ‘The children of privilege,’ he thundered, ‘feel vividly alive only while victimizing, even torturing.’ You don’t say? Even sports writers got into the act. Selena Roberts located Duke University ‘at the intersection of entitlement and enablement,… virtuous on the outside, debauched on the inside.'”
The New Criterion’s indictment of the Duke faculty is also worth reading. I encourage you to read the whole piece.