Got to Laugh to Keep from Crying

Another morality play has been played out.  Catholic high school kids from Kentucky—obviously Southern bigots—harassed a Native American Marine, a Vietnam veteran, and one of the all-white adolescent louts deliberately got in his way and, with a smug grin on his face, humiliated the brave old man.  They should be expelled, cried the watchdogs in the media, their school should be humiliated.  One particularly repellant female demanded the release of their names and addresses so that outraged leftists could tar and feather them.  Another depicted the students being put--MAGA hat first--through a chipper.

The best line came from the bastion of orthodox leftism that calls itself "conservative," namely National Review, where a conservative put up a post (now removed by his fellow-weasels).  After praising the dignified Indian activist and speculating that he might have combined Christian belief with his "indigenous "practices (what he meant by such irrelevancy we shall fortunately never know.)  He concluded by declaring in high-minded tone that the putatively Catholic students"might as well have just spit on the cross and got it over with.."

Even if the boys were guilty as slandered, such a blasphemous remark was entirely uncalled for.  The writer--someone named Frankovich--has since issued a perfunctory apology that does not begin to make amends for the unChristian nastiness of his statement.  Too bad he doesn't know any more grammar (the standard past participle is "spat") than he knows Christian theology.

The redneck kids were actually middle-class Middle-American suburbanites from Covington, a suburb of Cincinnati, and, as it turned out, the Indian demonstrator--whether because he is delusional or simply a liar--grotesquely misrepresented events.  It was later revealed that he was not a war veteran and, though he stressed his Indian credentials, he was reared by a white family from the age of five,  The boys, who were the actual victims,  had been subjected to nasty harassment by one of the loonier ethno-religious cults that have made America a satiric target for two centuries at least.  The cult in question consists of American blacks who insist they are the lost tribes of Israel—one big step beyond the lunacy of British Israelites like the great Herbert W. Armstrong, founder the Worldwide Church of God.  The Black Hebrews were particularly nasty to a black student whose organs, they insisted, were going to be harvested by the white kids.

But, you are going to ask, what about that smug expression on the face of the smart-smart-aleck punk?  As I read the full account of the event and watched some of the video, I recalled an incident in the eight grade.  The teacher—poor Miss Carlson who was, unknown to us, under treatment for cancer—had left the room long enough for mayhem to break out.  Three boys were singled out at random.  We were no guiltier than the others, but the teacher was perfectly correct to practice decimation.  I was standing behind the teacher as she berated my friend Chuck.  Naturally, I started grinning and making faces that only Chuck could see, and, as his face took on an expression identical to the smart-aleck Kentuckian, she grabbed his hair and pounded his head against the wall.  To the three of us then, it seemed a perfectly reasonable response—as it does to me today.  Chuck, who was the biggest and toughest kid in the class, hardly resented my provocation, though as I recall he did slug me in the arm.

So, imgaine you are in the smart-aleck’s position: berated and threatened by lunatic blacks, you and your pals are remaining cool and countering only with some school-spirit chants.  Then, at the height of the madness, a crazed Indian injects himself, beating a drum in your face.  The poor kid was simply trying to keep from laughing.

What is not so funny is the immunity enjoyed by the liars and libelers who constitute the vast majority of people working in the media.  Once upon a time, you could sue the pants off slanderers and liars, and, if all else failed, you could beat them with a stick or even a gutta percha cane.

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Thomas Fleming

Thomas Fleming is president of the Fleming Foundation. He is the author of six books, including The Morality of Everyday Life and The Politics of Human Nature, as well as many articles and columns for newspapers, magazines,and learned journals. He holds a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a B.A. in Greek from the College of Charleston. He served as editor of Chronicles: a Magazine of American Culture from 1984 to 2015 and president of The Rockford Institute from 1997-2014. In a previous life he taught classics at several colleges and served as a school headmaster in South Carolina

7 Responses

  1. Christopher Check says:

    A member of the faculty at UC Riverside out here in the Land of the Lotus Eaters posted the young man’s picture and called it the most punchable face he’d seen. Twitter, of course, reacted instantly and suspended this man’s account for calling for assault. (Alas, no.) Meanwhile, the Bishop of Covington kept up his condemnation of the boy front and center on the Diocesan website even after the truth had been revealed. Now the site is “down for maintenance” doubtless as they try to spin a non apology. If I were the father of these boys, I’d be looking into a defamation suit. My colleague , Trent Horn, on our radio show yesterday said that when he is in Cincinnati in March he’d be happy to buy these boys dinner for their witness to the unborn babies. And this, of course, is the whole reason for the story–as many as 600,000 march in DC (perhaps the best attended March For Life ever?) and NPR makes up a story with the the help of a Skrillex video actor. Whatever we might say about the effectiveness of the pro-life movement, I’m not sure there is another public demonstration that has sustained these kinds of numbers for 46 years. I hold that until people throw away their pills this country will continue to kill babies, but the March is newsworthy unless your agenda is sexual license, in which case it must be discredited. With all of you in Sicily in spirit!

  2. Frank Brownlow says:

    I didn’t know about the black lunatics, but the Indian “Marine veteran” is a well-known professional “protestor” or nuisance. What, though, is to be done about our faux or so-called bishops, starting at the top? Making fools of themselves in public is the least of their offenses.

  3. Khater M says:

    A few months ago I was on a bus when I overheard a conversation between two men who must’ve been Black Hebrew Israelites. Much of it was typical( making connections between the slavery of the Israelites in Egypt and American slavery) but some of their theories were amusingly interesting. One of the men said that the reason modern scholars call the Middle Ages the “Dark Ages” is because blacks ruled Europe at the time. Talk about a bad pun

  4. James D. says:

    The cowardly, and likely-complicit, Bishop Roger Joseph Foys of the Covington Diocese has continued to condemn the Catholic high school students and grovel to the media, “Big Medicine” and anybody else who will take a pound of flesh and a free shot at white Christians. Weak, cowardly school officials have also been groveling and apologizing.

  5. Robert Peters says:

    The effeminate and emasculated spokesmen of my Protestant denomination, under the thrall of “therapeutic Christianity,” are either yet and still condemning the young men, even as the evidence denies them that warrant, or they are equivocating, holding the young men to the same “standard” of practiced adult agitators such as “the noble savage” and the utterly lost “children of Israel.” These “men of the Faith” do not consider themselves to be “liberals” among the flock but rather stalwart “conservatives.”

  6. Avatar photo Thomas Fleming says:

    I added a few bits, as the story unfolded. In particular:

    The best line came from the bastion of orthodox leftism that calls itself “conservative,” namely National Review, where a conservative put up a post (now removed by his fellow-weasels). After praising the dignified Indian activist and speculating that he might have combined Christian belief with his “indigenous “practices (what he meant by such irrelevancy we shall fortunately never know.) He concluded by declaring in high-minded tone that the putatively Catholic students”might as well have just spit on the cross and got it over with..”

    Even if the boys were guilty as slandered, such a blasphemous remark was entirely uncalled for. The writer–someone named Frankovich–has since issued a perfunctory apology that does not begin to make amends for the unChristian nastiness of his statement. Too bad he doesn’t know any more grammar (the standard past participle is “spat”) than he knows Christian theology.

  7. James D. says:

    Bill Buckley would be proud.