I wonder how many people at Duke read KC Johnson’s editorial about campus reactions to the allegations against the lacrosse team, posted on Inside Higher Ed on May 1, 2006 (probably at least one—in the comments there’s a brief clarification signed “Mark Anthony Neal”). It’s an editorial that deserved more attention than I suspect it got. It voiced a perspective that needed to be heard and held an unflattering mirror up to the contingent of Duke faculty who approached the lacrosse case as a platform for big institutional and ideological issues, ignoring or perhaps even supporting the shoddy investigation and the thoughtless, shrill protests. The editorial is clear and to the point, and it’s relatively free of the tiresome, judgmental rhetoric that clutters Johnson’s blog, Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW). The sympathetic observations about athletics and athletes are especially good. All in all it does exactly what a good editorial should do—it articulates a firm opinion in a way that encourages reconsideration and debate. This one, it seems to me, presented an opportunity for the people that Johnson targeted to think about what they really wanted to stand for.
Focussing on that editorial makes a great deal of Johnson’s subsequent blogging seem redundant. Probably that has more to do with 20-20 hindsight and my poor opinion of DIW than anything else. The blog went on and on, though, accumulating a lot of detail but very little depth. I might feel differently if the editorial had been about the criminal investigation. In the three posts Johnson wrote for Cliopatria in April 2006—the start of what would become Durham-in-Wonderland—he touched on Reade Seligmann’s convincing alibi, the flawed line-ups, and Nifong’s political opportunism and the pandering that went with it. Those turned out to be good indicators of how the prosecution would go (how it would crash and burn, that is), and Johnson read them more accurately than many of us. The stakes were high, and there was every reason to keep a close eye on what Nifong was doing. But as the title says, the editorial is about “Duke’s Poisoned Campus Culture,” and the problems with the investigation are only mentioned to show how clouded and agenda-driven the judgment of many professors at Duke had been. Based on DIW, Johnson seems to have been as prescient about those professors as he was about Nifong. But within the frame of such a sprawling narrative, prescience and tunnel vision can be hard to tell apart, and when it comes to Duke’s campus culture, it’s tunnel vision that dominates in DIW.
Johnson was already blogging and editorializing about academic culture issues when the charges against the lacrosse team hit the news. The ideological skew of Duke’s faculty figured in a piece he wrote for Inside Higher Ed the previous summer. From it he recycles a bad joke about stupid conservatives told by the chairman of Duke’s philosophy department, giving it vastly overblown significance as stage-setting for the lacrosse case. His glaring evidence of poison, though—the foundation of his ongoing critique of Duke faculty—is the “listening” statement, which he’d written about for the first time about a week before “Duke’s Poisoned Campus Culture.” Along with the statement came the so-called “Group of 88” (his term, I believe) who endorsed it, professors he found so transparent that he casually extrapolates their collective thinking to its “logical, if absurd, extreme”—some lacrosse players should be convicted for rape just because of who they are, no matter what they did or didn’t do.
After the editorial, the only significant change I see in Johnson’s picture of Duke’s campus culture is his assessment of Brodhead and of the lacrosse players, which quickly becomes morally simplistic. In fact a key passage is different in the version of the editorial posted on DIW (overstruck words are on Inside Higher Ed and the italicized word is in the blog):
Few would deny that several players on Duke’s lacrosse team have behaved
repulsivelybadlly [sic]. Two team captains hired exotic dancers, supplied alcohol to underage team members, and concluded a public argument with one of the dancers with racial epithets. Brodheadappropriatelycancelled the team’s season and demanded the coach’s resignation.
As far as his trumped-up “Group” goes, things remain the same without even changing much.
In the editorial, Johnson writes, “It’s hard to escape the conclusion that, for [Houston] Baker and many others who signed the faculty statement, the race, class, and gender of the men’s lacrosse team produced a guilty-until-proven-innocent mentality.” It was hard for him to escape the conclusion, that’s for sure. Fast-forward to “Legacies,” his final post before putting DIW on hiatus in December 2007, and he highlights the “race/class/gender extremists” who jerked the administration’s chain and were “only too willing to advance their personal, pedagogical, or ideological agendas on the backs of their own students.” Another major legacy he chooses to reinforce is “the pernicious effects of academic groupthink,” a theme that he first brought up in DIW in late May 2006 (the legacy he doesn’t mention is DIW’s remarkable success at fostering its own little groupthink community, part of a gossiping network of like-minded sites).
On the face of it, it’s hard for me to see how a historian could spend a year and a half analyzing an ongoing controversy and find nothing that poses a significant challenge to his earliest firm impressions of it. It’s a record that suggests that the project isn’t really analysis, and in fact it turns out to be more like prosecution. There’s no denying that the most prominent and vocal of the faculty he criticizes did nothing overt to break the mold—they stuck close to their issues or were silent, so Johnson is fully justified in sticking to his guns as well. Still, there’s a lot of filtering out of things he apparently doesn’t want the ladies and gentlemen of the jury to be thinking about. And filtering alone isn’t enough to support the one-sided case he seems determined to make. It also requires quite a bit of what I’ve described as misrepresentation, manipulation, distortion, etc. Now I realize there’s a better word for all that, one that really captures the spirit of Johnson’s anti-academic crusade—bullshit.
It was a reader’s comment that got me thinking about how useful the word is (I’ll get back to the comment later), and then I remembered a little book I bought a few years ago called On Bullshit, written by Princeton philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt. One of my favorite lines from it—part of a discussion of whether bullshit is analogous to “carelessly made, shoddy goods”—brings out the book’s quietly surreal juxtaposition of subject and style.
Excrement is not designed or crafted at all; it is merely emitted, or dumped. It may have a more or less coherent shape, or it may not, but it is in any case certainly not wrought.
The “essence of bullshit,” according to Frankfurt, is a “lack of connection to a concern with truth—[an] indifference to how things really are.” That sets it apart not only from truth-telling but also from lying, because you have to consider the truth before you can tell a lie. In a helpful review of the book in Slate, Timothy Noah gives as an example the claim the famously surfaced in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address, about Saddam Hussein’s efforts to buy nuclear material from Niger. The possible basis for that claim is murky enough that it might not be the best example, but assuming for the sake of argument that it was as bogus as Bush’s critics believe, it does seem more like indifference to the truth than like a conscious decision to peddle outright falsehood.
Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they endeavor either to describe the world correctly or describe it deceitfully. For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to. Through excessive indulgence in the latter activity, which involves making assertions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say, a person’s normal habit of attending to the way things are may become attenuated or lost.
Noah’s example brings out a limitation of Frankfurt’s schematic analysis, though. In many real-world situations even the most honest person can’t be sure about “the way things are.” What I think stands for “the truth” in those situations is honest, dispassionate analysis, even though it might lead different people to different truths. With respect to national security matters like the yellowcake from Niger, the uncertainty and inaccessibility of the evidence seems to be a standing invitation to bullshit—one that’s frequently accepted by politicians of all stripes. The Bush administration seems to find it especially irresistible, and even compared to other political machines they’re way out of the “normal habit of attending to the way things are.”
It isn’t just a matter of “what it suits one to say,” though. First of all, bullshit isn’t likely to work if it isn’t plausible and/or appealing to the intended audience. And it usually serves some purpose or furthers some agenda—justifying a war, for instance. Johnson treats the lacrosse case as a battlefront in the culture war, so even though he approaches the fight more like a prosecutor than a general his purpose isn’t so different from Bush’s. His analysis is thoroughly agenda-driven—scratch the surface, and you’re likely to find some bullshit. And it can be pretty easy to identify. He’s covered the scandal from a distance, drawing on essays, interviews, news reports, and the like. Often in DIW all you have to do is follow the helpful link to the original text. There’s a fair chance that it’s been manipulated to show that the person who said or wrote it has exactly the values and beliefs that you’d expect from a race/class/gender extremist, or else fudged to bring out the topsy-turvy irrationality of Wonderland, where the crazies and cowards are running the show. Some of Johnson’s bullshit is generated in other ways, but the end it serves is pretty consistent.
I made a list of some of the more obvious bullshit I’ve come across in DIW, but it’s gotten so long enough that I’ll post it separately, within a day or two. Much of it comes from earlier entries, though: What Mark Anthony Neal supposedly hears students mutter at the beginning of the new semester, the persecution of Steven Baldwin, and just about everything Johnson wrote about Karla Holloway’s article “Coda: Body of Evidence.”
It’s one thing for a self-appointed pundit to churn out bullshit—it’s practically the job description. Even a moderate amount of bullshit from someone backed by the power of law enforcement is a much more serious thing. Nifong seems to have been a copious, shameless bullshitter, and the consequences were disastrous for the people who ended up under his thumb. The silver lining is that in the end it all came back to haunt him. In the first flush of news coverage he spent hours and hours feeding the beast what it wanted to hear. Speaking to N&O reporter Joe Neff, James Coleman starts off sounding a bit like Frankfurt:
“Either he knew what the facts were and misstated them, or he was making them up,” said James Coleman, a Duke law professor who has publicly requested that Nifong remove himself from the case. “Whether he acted knowing they were false, or if he was reckless, it doesn’t matter in the long run. This is the kind of stuff that causes the public to lose confidence in the justice system.”
A line of bullshit that was all too effective in rallying the Duke community and neighbors against the lacrosse team was the bit about how they were stonewalling. It seems to have been largely the work of Durham Police Cpl. David Addison. Among his deceptive statements was this one, to the Durham Herald-Sun: “Addison said police approached the lacrosse team with the five-page search warrant on March 16, but that all of the members refused to cooperate with the investigation.” In fact after the search warrant was executed co-captains David Evans, Dan Flannery and Matt Zash volunteered to be interviewed by the police at length and without counsel present.
In late April 2006, a headline in USA Today announced “A perfect storm: Explosive convergence helps lacrosse scandal resonate.” Behind the storm, according to the article, was the “national flash points of race, class, gender, violence, money and privilege.” (James Coleman’s pithy reply a year later: sure it was a perfect storm, “but we know now it was based on this false notion a crime had been committed…. That generated everything.”). Duke is a sprawling institution that tries to be a great many things to a great many people, and it’s my sense that the lacrosse team became a vessel not only for the reflexive shock and disgust tied to those “national flash points” but also for various smoldering frustrations with the university. From where I sit now the collective reaction of much of the community looks like a body ejecting diseased cells that had been circulating undetected. Whatever the factors were behind it, it wasn’t pretty, and it seems to have made it hard to think clearly. It was not only irresponsible but a remarkable lapse of common sense if, as alleged in one of the ongoing civil suits, the message from the Duke administration to the players was “you don’t need a lawyer,” and “don’t tell anyone this is happening, not even your parents” (McFayden et al v. Duke University et al, p. 129). And it’s true, as Tim Tyson recently noted, that folks around campus were reacting to information that came from people who were in a unique position to know—the police and the prosecutor. In different circumstances, though, if the accused had looked more like the people who are typical charged with violent crimes, the word of the authorities would likely have been taken with healthy skepticism if not disdain. It seems like that skepticism should cut both ways. All in all it was fertile ground for Addison’s misinformation. Some people, including a number of professors who really should have known better, took it as an excuse to indulge in a little high-handed vigilantism, for example by singling the players out in class or in private communications and exhorting them to fess up.
No one took up the invitation to vigilantism and ran further with it than the potbangers. It took some bullshitting to fit real-life events and people to their metanarrative—another dimension to the mirror-image parallelism between the potbangers and KC Johnson that I pointed out in my first post about the case. For both, “perfecting” and bullshitting seem to go hand in hand (that’s using—maybe abusing—a term that I continue to find very apt, introduced into the debate by Wahneema Lubiano). For the potbangers, the need to embroider went beyond just “perfecting” the offenders and the “survivor.” What stands out to me is the bizarre reasoning that took a form of protest from tight-knit but underpoliced third-world communities and dropped it into the middle of a first-world media feeding frenzy.
This is a good place to bring up the comment that got me thinking about bullshit in the first place, since it puts the potbangers into sharp relief. It’s from RRH, an attorney and also a mainstay of the DIW commentariat, part of an interesting exchange we had about how and why our perspectives on the case are so profoundly different.
Attorneys have heard—or heard from other attorneys—nearly every cockamamie story there is. Thus, we have developed internal “bullshit-detectors” that are so finely tuned that they are probably exceeded by only those of cops. Thus, when I heard the first reports about lacrosse case in 2006 (on ESPN), I was skeptical to the point just short of disbelief. The story is that several Alpha-male college students were going to risk reputations, diseases, paternity lawsuits, future careers, and family shame to put their most precious body parts into a party stripper? As we say in the legal business, that story already “strained credulity”.
And that’s even without the added allegation that the sex was involuntary. A party stripper with such fastidious morals and high standards of sex partners that she was going to turn down a chance for mating with such Alpha-males? Again, the bullshit-detector is sounding like an air raid siren.
I don’t understand how the “allegation that the sex was involuntary” could be in addition to the first reports, and the pop sociobiology doesn’t do much for me. But I don’t at all dismiss the bullshit detector he’s talking about, and it seems to me that there’s more behind it than just stories. “Perfecting” clients would surely be a great way to be a lousy lawyer. To be effective in the nitty-gritty of a criminal proceeding, it seems to me you’d have to be firmly in touch with the unvarnished and sometimes unpalatable humanity of everyone involved. That realization has helped me to clarify the nature and ethics of the choice that was made by protesters who felt they needed to shout slogans as if there was no question a rape occurred. Their perspective on the accuser—at the time not really “Crystal Mangum” but the heavily filtered impressions of her from the media and police—may be more palatable than RRH’s, but those protesters could and in my opinion did get things wildly wrong without experiencing any significant consequences.
It doesn’t take RRH’s crude realism to rein in the bullshit. It seems to me, anyway, that enough mental discipline to keep the accuser in the realm of everyday, imperfect human beings should be sufficient. There is a big temptation to put a positive spin on the accuser in high-profile rape cases, or at least on this particular one. I understand and respect the desire to resist dismissive and demeaning efforts to put these women on trial in the court of public opinion and undercut them in the court of law. But it seems to be a hard thing to do without getting into some euphemistic bullshit, even when it’s not nearly as idealizing as the potbanger’s rhetoric. For instance, Cathy Davidson, a professor of English at Duke, asks, “Who is that exotic dancer? A single mother who takes off her clothes for hire partly to pay for tuition at a distinguished historically black college.” I’m quoting Davidson because her op-ed is handy at the moment. It’s not really fair to pick on her, though, since her main point is socioeconomic—in different circumstances she could have replaced “takes off her clothes” with “cleans toilets seven nights a week” or “serves as a guinea pig for grueling pharmaceutical trials.” But I feel like I’ve seen a number of variations on the theme of the student mom reduced to stripping to get an education, and for me they have a sanitized feel that calls to mind noxious Hollywood fairy tales like “Pretty Woman.” The rhetoric kicked up by recent news that Mangum graduated from North Carolina Central showed that she’s still little more than a rhetorical football for both sides. It seemed like an event with enough significance and irony to provoke some clear-headed analysis, but I didn’t find any.
My feeling is that one purpose of the critical analysis and writing we assign to our undergraduates is building up their resistance to bullshit. Whether or not that’s a common opinion, it seems like professors, of all people, should be bullshit detectors and not bullshit producers. And not just detectors pointed at the other side—as I’ve shown by example many times, that’s the easy part. I can think of only two at Duke who’ve stood out for their non-partisan bullshit detecting—James Coleman and Michael Gustafson. It’s a discredit to the professors on the Left—especially but not only at Duke—that they had nothing to say about the poor judgment and poor reasoning of the potbangers and like-minded protesters. (The one exception I’m aware of is Wahneema Lubiano, of all people. I wish her reservations about “perfecting” had been less equivocal and more forthright, but those aren’t the main reasons her critics were so insistent about misconstruing her.)
I don’t see bullshit as such a consistent problem coming from the Duke side, which isn’t to say that they did a lot better than Johnson, just that they erred in different ways—most obviously with their callous attitude towards the students who were facing drastic legal consequences. There was definitely some bullshitting, though. Houston Baker’s histrionic letter is probably the standout. Parts of it—“And when will the others assaulted by racist epithets while passing 610 Buchanan ever forget that dark moment brought on them by a group of drunken Duke boys?,” etc.—are not only bullshit, they’re pretentious bullshit. It’s my impression that many liestoppers would put Cathy Davidson’s January 2007 editorial high on the bullshit scale. Taken as a whole I don’t see why it’s so offensive—a lot of it strikes me as honest and conciliatory—but she does start out with a whopper, claiming that in the rhetorical climate that motivated the “listening” statement, “defending David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann necessitated reverting to pernicious stereotypes about African-Americans, especially poor black women.” Not only had those three not been indicted when the “listening” statement was published, they hadn’t even been singled out from the rest of the team as likely suspects. It’s a straightforward mistake, but for someone writing an editorial that purports to explain key events of the first few intense weeks of the scandal, it does suggest indifference to reality. I imagine that the line that serves as Karla Holloway’s motto in DIW—“White innocence means black guilt. Men’s innocence means women’s guilt”—would also be ranked as prime bullshit by her critics. Understood in context, I think that’s debatable. It seems to me that it’s not with any particular statement that she most clearly lapses into bullshit, it’s her general failure to own up to her role in stirring up the bitter discourse that she found so onerous, and her tendency to place herself outside and on the receiving end of the university’s power structure. And then there’s the “listening” statement. For me it’s the first line—“We are listening to our students”—that stands out as obvious bullshit. They were listening to some of their students. It’s too much like the vacuous cliché about listening to the “will of the American people” that’s endlessly falling out of the mouths of politicians.
It’s a pretty good measure of the real purpose and integrity of DIW that, leaving aside Baker’s letter, which is pretty much a sitting duck, Johnson responds to most of this stuff from the Duke side with bullshit of his own. The DIW impression of Holloway’s infamous line is largely an artifact of Johnson’s bullshit. And after pointing out the factual silliness of Davidson’s mention of the three indicted players, he turns to the statement she surely meant to make, about rhetoric in defense of the lacrosse players generally.
In late March, when the idea for the Group of 88’s statement originated, who—either on Duke’s campus or in the media—was elevating the lacrosse players “to the status of martyrs, innocent victims of reverse racism”? Certainly not the protesters to whom Davidson and the other Group members said “thank you”…. Between March 29 and the issuance of the Group’s statement on April 6, were members of the media or cable news network talking heads elevating the lacrosse players “to the status of martyrs, innocent victims of reverse racism”?
He starts by asking exactly the right question, then gives a non-answer that’s really just an excuse to slip in one of his boilerplate formulas for denouncing the “Group,” and finally comes to rest on “media or cable news network talking heads.” It may be bullshit to claim that there was backlash against black students, and “[t]he insults, at that time, were rampant.” I can’t say for sure either way. But I’m confident that a great deal was said and felt by students walking across campus at night, say, or down a dorm hallway, that wasn’t picked up by any “talking heads” or even in the campus paper. No doubt it suits Johnson to believe that he was getting a complete and accurate impression of events at Duke as he was following the news from several states away. It’s self-serving bullshit, though, especially coming from a historian dabbling in journalism—people in both fields are supposed to have some sophistication about the way their evidence is mediated. He could have gleaned at least a hint of what black students experienced at the time from the comments quoted in the “listening” statement. But he never treats those students as if they’re worth listening to (he does suggest in an obnoxious reference to them as “alleged students [who] can testify as to what they said” that they’d be good subjects for an inquisition).
At least two Duke professors picked up echos in the lacrosse incident of institutionalized, open, and often violent racism of the old South. For both there’s a close connection to their scholarly work. Both allude to the unproven nature of the rape allegations and claim to be setting them aside while they consider other aspects of the students’ behavior that evening, but it seems to me that the impression of the brutality of the alleged crime still filters into their judgment (see James Coleman’s comment above about the perfect storm). Tim Tyson saw the “spirit of the lynch mob” in the crowd of young men at the party. William Chafe saw a continuation of the “poisonous linkage of race and sex as instruments of power and control” that’s integral to southern history. I know that for me and many others, the impression of a gang of young white men clustered drunkenly around a couple of half-naked black women had some very ugly resonances. But that’s a gut response, and it seems like neither Chase or Tyson gave it the critical consideration they should have before they said their piece. I’ve already described my reservations with Tyson’s lynch mob analogy. Turning to Chafe, how much context, really, does Emmett Till—brutally beaten and then shot, eye gouged out, barbed wire strung around his neck—provide for that party? In both cases, there is a bullshit gap, I guess you could call it. In fact the gap seems so obvious, especially in Chafe’s case, that I don’t really feel like they’re trying to bullshit me.
Mark Anthony Neal’s comments about “racialized sexual violence” pull the same general issues into a more contemporary context—relating the lacrosse incident not to old-fashioned lynching and brutality but to the present-day media-driven discourse that holds that “black women and their bodies have little value, little protection and are accessible to anyone who feels entitled to them.” It seems to me that this makes some contact with the spirit of the party. There was, for instance, the infamous parting shot: “Hey bitch, thank your grandpa for my nice cotton shirt.” (According to KC Johnson it’s “a tasteless rip-off of a Chris Rock joke”—a widely held opinion that I find entirely plausible, but it’s typical of the mountain of self-perpetuating verbiage that’s been left by this scandal that I can’t find a source pinning the joke to any particular Chris Rock show. I did find a thread on the TalkLeft forums initiated by someone wanting to know the same thing—after 200+ comments there’s no definitive conclusion.) Being more plugged into the here and now turns out to have its dangers—it leads Neal into some speculation about how the lacrosse team may have been “hoping to consume something that they felt that a black woman uniquely possessed.” That would be blatant bullshit if it wasn’t framed as speculation—perhaps it still counts, but it’s most problematic for other reasons.
Neal is capable of writing with style and insight about the “fo’ real,” as he calls it, but in this case the elision he makes between rhetorical violence and brutal physical assault lands him in bullshit territory. RRH’s caustic perspective is again an antidote, a reminder of how animalistic the alleged acts would have been, and the deeply ingrained barriers that would have had to be overcome. It seems to me that a more incisive point of reference is the typical scenarios for alcohol- and entitlement-fueled assaults involving college students, which usually involve some mutual socializing and perhaps mixed signals as well. It’s not hard to see how the inhibition is overcome in those circumstances, and it’s not far-fetched that there could be some acting out of the kind of rhetoric Neal highlighted. The final step in RRH’s bullshit detecting is statistical—“Single-offender white on black rapes are so infrequent that they show up usually as asterisks in crime statistics, and white multiple offender rapes of black women are barely more frequent than carjackings by Amish farmers.” It’s grounds for skepticism, for sure, but it’s just mindless number that could be hiding who knows what biases or artifacts. There’s little if any insight in it.
{ 59 } Comments
Let me get this straight. K.C. Johnson is at fault (and the moral equivalent of the disbarred Nifong) because he focused on the public statements of the enablers of this hoax instead on dwelling on their private thoughts and the multitudes of private conversations that went on at Duke. Whatever.
No. You’ve misread, missed the point, and about the supposed “moral equivalence,” ignored both my implicit and explicit statements to the contrary. But like you say, whatever.
The BS alarms in this case never cease and are not confined to just those that you mention. It is interesting that a lawyer is quick to point out things that set off a BS alarm, when it is coming from the opposite side. This vast consortium of conspirators lawsuit for example, gets my BS meter screaming. The vile email explained away as having no other motivation than a sarcastic literary reference to American Psycho. The accidental, last minute, serendipitous discovery of the ‘hidden’ DNA in the DNASI report is another. The defense team dropping the motion to have Nifong removed from the case just before the December 15th hearing explained as some sort of gesture of goodwill. There was a lot of slinging of BS back and forth in this case, some of the BS being unlikely but possible and other BS being very unlikely and almost impossible. The blind acceptance of the absolute truth of some of this BS is another story entirely.
KC does a good job of framing his bullshit in a way that makes it seem that there is no possible other explanation to any of his conclusions. Some of the folk he picks on are not quite as adept at bullshitting. Perhaps they lack the experience KC has.
Yeah, I’m sure anyone who’s been following the case for a long time can make a long list of bullshit. I made no effort at completeness! I think the only sensible assumption is that nobody has a perfect bullshit detector and it makes a lot of sense to pay some attention to the ones that are tuned very differently from our own, and those often belong to people we have fundamental disagreements with. But that’s starting to sound like a platitude—everyone’s bullshit detector is different in its own special way. Anybody thinking about writing a children’s book?
I’ve now read Prof. Leiter’s blog posting critiquing KC’s critique of the Ad of 88. I’ve also read his CV, prompted by your description of him.
He seems to be quite the scholar. Looking over his CV, I can say most assuredly that should I ever require an expert on the influence of Nietzsche on American law, I know who I want. If I can digress a moment, I should say that as an undergraduate, many of my electives were spent in philosophy courses. (One of the benefits of being a journalism major is that you have more elective hours than anyone else.) As a result I became quite familiar with Nietzsche – at least, as familiar as one could become at the university before being required to read him in the original German. I liked Nietzsche and thought he made more sense than most 19th century European thinkers – though it must be said that given my opinion of the overall caliber of 19th century European philosophy this is indeed only faint praise.
Continuing through his CV, I see that Prof. Leiter went to Princeton in 1980 at the age of 17 (or even 16?) and he seems to have remained in the embrace of academia ever since. I am jealous of him. I always wanted to “live a life of the mind” – so much, in fact, that as a youngster I used to think that a long prison sentence might be worthwhile because with my basic needs taken care of, I would be free to read, read, read. (An idea of doing the same thing through the academy never crossed my mind. I came from such an extensive line of farmers that when in 1989 my bride-to-be was sending out wedding invitations, she commented, “Everyone in your family lives on ‘Rural Route something’”.)
As I think I’ve mentioned to you before, I went to law school at a late age – I was nearly 36 when I started. Thus, most of my classmates were years younger. The youngest were 14 or more years younger. I remember thinking that must be an interesting life – “Wow , straight from kindergarten to law review without a single break from school”. Given his obvious intellect and energy, Prof. Leiter’s future progress up the academic ladder may create a life, “Straight from kindergarten to law dean.”
The academy’s continual rewards (amply justified) to Prof. Leiter may account for his admirable loyalty to the profession and may be what led him to defend the Duke professors who attacked their students. I understand loyalty, and if I will be indulged another digression, I have a confession. When Mike Nifong was under siege from the state ethics commission and by the court for contempt, I was probably the most sympathetic member of KC’s Sunshine Band. I know how lawyers can get “tunnel vision” when they have a “great case”. In this vein, I would urge you to watch the movie, A Civil Action, starring John Travolta and Robert Duvall. If you do, you will come to the scene where you will want to grab Travolta’s character by the lapels and shout, “They’re offering you $20 million – take it and drop the case!” Similarly, there were times during the lacrosse case when one might have wished to grab Nifong by his lapels and shout, “You’ve won the election – drop the case!”
Now turning, finally, to Prof. Leiter’s critique of KC Johnson. When you first informed me that a eminent law professor was defending the Ad of 88, my first thoughts turned to the Pennzoil vs. Texaco lawsuit. In that case, Pennzoil had made a deal to buy a smaller oil company. They just needed to “put the ribbon on the package”. Then Texaco swooped in at the last minute and bought the company. Pennzoil sued Texaco for, essentially, tortious interference with a contract. Texaco defended with law professors who told the jurors, in essence, as a matter a law “a ‘(mere) deal’ is not an ‘(exalted) contract’”. They might be able to awe first-year law students into believing that, but the jury awarded a record $10 billion in damages.
Then I read Prof. Leiter’s piece. As I told you in a previous comment, that ad was the kind of thing that prompts jurors to ask, “How much is ‘every last cent the defendant has’?” In a trial, Duke could get all the professors it likes to argue – as Prof. Leiter does — that “the ad wasn’t really about the lacrosse incident”. The jury would award massive damages. (Interestingly, another “real world” lawyer wrote to Prof. Leiter to raise the same points that I have. Prof. Leiter’s dismissive treatment of that lawyer’s arguments would have been as effective as Texaco’s law professors’ treatment of Pennzoil’s arguments.)
Prof. Leiter’s case against KC is basically that KC makes his case by “taking snippets of the ad out of the context of the whole ad”. But the same criticism can be made of Prof. Leiter: His defense of the ad ignores the context – the daily protests, etc. – in which it was made. That ad was gasoline on a fire. It reminds me of a comment made by someone who raised the case of French Capt. Alfred Dreyfus who was a Jew charged with treason in the 1890s. The commenter said it was as if leading members of the French military had – in the midst of the Dreyfus Affair – had taken out a similar ad to the Ad of 88 and then claimed they didn’t mean to affect Dreyfus specifically, but just decrying the distressing lack of patriotism among Jews generally. Who’s going to believe that?
I hope I’ve shown why I think that Prof. Leiter, while admirably defending his profession, has not made a strong case. At any rate, I have promised not to post on your blog again before finishing this comment and one about Prof. Neal. I will do the comment on Prof. Neal next.
When I responded to Prof. Anderson’s misconceptions about the Scottsboro Boys case, you raised the report of Miss Hollace Randall. I was first inclined to write a comment about Miss Randall but didn’t for two reasons: (1) she’s a woman, and (2) she’s deceased. With my upbringing to not attack women or the dead, this combination led me to decide to let Miss Randall go undisturbed. But if I had her on a witness stand in the 1930s, I would’ve made it the worst day of her life.
Finally, I notice that you’ve used one of my comments to make some points in a recent post. I will comment on that once I have made good on my pledge to comment on Prof. Neal first.
RRH
Well, I can’t argue with you about juries, or at least there wouldn’t be much point. But Leiter is blogging primarily for an academic and legal-academic audience. If he wanted to convince a jury, I imagine he’d express himself differently, and if he couldn’t express himself differently, smart real-world lawyers would presumably not put him up on the stand. Anyway, I’m not very warm to the idea that if I want to puzzle out what that (or any) text communicates I should ask myself what a jury would make of it.
It’s true that Leiter doesn’t attend to the real-world context at the time the ad was published, but he never pretends to be doing anything other than a textual analysis. I agree that to address the significance of the ad and the judgment of those who endorsed it, you have to consider the context it was published into. For that it would be good to start with a realistic picture of what was going on. There were several large rallies on or near campus and there were some very shrill and foolish protests. I’ve said several times that I think we should have heard some criticism and repudiation of the excesses of those protests from professors who endorsed the ad. But daily protests? I don’t think so—I didn’t see any when I was on campus. Gasoline on the flames is a stretch, too. The big rallies on campus and the potbanging had been done a week or so before the ad came out, and there was no upsurge in protests after it was printed.
Prof. Leiter does seem to be rocketing up the ladder of academic success—it looks like he’s just moved from UT Austin to Chicago.
Please allow me to edit the last post. It should say
A source of a lot of frustration for the defenders of the Lax guys has been the tendency of so many on the other side to simply ignore the meaning and the implications of the State AG choosing to use the word “innocent” to in referrence to the case. I really seems to me that a reasonable person would not thereafter try to attach any special meaning to anything like the Mcfadden email. So what if it expressed some anger? Or a lot of anger. It is not a crime to be angry at someone who just ripped you off. And how could anyone criticise the actions of the defense team? What is the point? For what it is worth, they could afford to have been honest because they never needed to lie about anything. They would win best the quicker information got out. The word is “innocent”.
As to the question of whether our blog owner ascribed moral equivalence between Nifong and KC. If the blog owner wants his readers to clearly understand that he means to avoid ascribing moral equivalence why does he choose to describe KC as a “prosecutor” who uses deceptive and under-handed techniques - words that are indelibly linked to M. Nifong?
I’m glad you decided to rewrite. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the other one.
As to prosecutor, I’ve said what I mean about that and it’s up to my readers to understand or not. The title of the post (“KC Johnson: the other Duke Lacrosse prosecutor”).
I think it’s revealing that your assumption, when you see that I’m suggesting that there are parallels between Johnson and a criminal prosecutor like Nifong, you jump straight to “moral equivalence.” What kind of dimwit would suggest that hounding a bunch of professors in a blog is the moral equivalent of trying to send three people to jail for a crime they didn’t commit? I expect you disagree with my analogy—so fine, disagree.
There’s no denying that the most prominent and vocal of the faculty he criticizes did nothing overt to break the mold–they stuck close to their issues or were silent, so Johnson is fully justified in sticking to his guns as well. “
I agree. But here’s the main difference I see between your harsh evaluation of KC’s “contributions” to this case and the “contributions” of the Duke faculty who joined the fray. The “back and forth” rhetoric on the subject of left wing faculty agendas or Campus Culture seems to me (an outsider) as a “family feud.” No one really stands to be harmed by this exchange and indeed, no member of the “88” has suffered harm, professional or otherwise. Receiving nasty Emails is indeed unpleasant (I did not enjoy the “messages I received online either) but is perhaps the ticket price for entering this contentious situation. But KC’s “prosecution” of the 88 did not put any one of them in jeopardy of losing 30 years of their lives. It does not ramp up a situation where, as one Lacrosse Mom told me…over 1000 death threats were received by her family in a week.
The debate over Campus Culture preceded this Lacrosse debacle and will go on. To most of us outside academia , it arouses no anger of the intensity that armed hate groups decide to try to come to campus or faculty feel they must sleep in their cars. The Listening Ad, however, and those who offered 88 signatures were at the very least reckless both in wording and timing. The sensitivities of the Black students on campus are, of course, important to acknowledge, but NOT at the most dangerous and vulnerable time for the safety and public perception of the Lacrosse team. Look at the wording…these are professors whose livelihood is words…whose profession is communication. How reckless to put up a public statement so unclear, so provocative, if that was NOT their intent! How reckless to not consider how those words might be viewed in the media feeding frenzy of hate and condemnation that was enveloping those boys before the most basic facts of the case were even available. How contemptible to lie , as Davidson did, that the boys were enveloped in a cocoon of campus sympathy that had to be countered in the early weeks of this case! That is not just “bullshit”…. that is the most hurtful deceitful denial of the pain these kids and families faced! She is denying the authenticity of what they endured to provide cover for HERSELF!
Then came the op-eds, opinion pieces, and Letters to the Editor. You have correctly outlined the “bullshit.” But you try to make some “moral equivalent” to the harm they did to public perception of these kids and the supposed “harm” KC has done to them. To the “Something Happened” crowd, these boys will always be thought guilty of a heinous rape or rape cover-up. What the worst that one might think of some signatory of the Listening AD? What burden, what smear do they carry for life?
These Duke Profs made a decision to go into print about this case and in almost every case, it reverberated to the detriment of the public perception of the Lacrosse team at the most dangerous time. THEY CHOSE to do this. Some of these kids just showed up at a party their captains called. They did NOT all know or vote on the hiring of strippers. They did not walk over there intending to denigrate Black womanhood. But now, in some circles, they are branded racists, rapists or both.
KC chose to stand up for these kids when they had little if any support. No professor at Duke decided to take on that DAILY role. Only a handful of Duke profs ever found an occasional voice to articulate against the prosecutorial sham that was unfolding before them. The silence spoke volumes to those observing from afar. To those who believed the lying Nifong and his enabling media friends, it was telling that “their own professors” …”those who KNEW them best” had nothing to say in their defense. Nothing.
To those who knew the boys to be innocent, that Faculty silence was cold, callous, self-absorbed and indicative of an emotional disinterest in the welfare of these Duke students. Individually, one by one, Duke faculty …like Kitty Genovese’s NYC neighbors… watched a crime unfold before them and shut the blinds.
There is no moral equivalency between KC’s Campus Culture critique of some professors and any “consequence” they face because of his “prosecution” and the harm that the negative PUBLIC outpouring of articles from certain professors and the almost universal SILENCE on the part of the others conveyed upon the Lacrosse Team. When each of these Professors joined the fray, THEY KNEW that jail time, ruined reputations, threats and hysteria were very real consequences these boys faced AS THEY WROTE. They knew this and poured gasoline on the fire anyway. Others watched them and knowing the very same things, chose to make NO attempt to counter or ameliorate the situation.
This, frankly, disgusts me. Would you have preferred KC stay silent too? Does his “prosecution” of those who recklessly entered a tumultuous situation and increased the danger to these young men really annoy you more than the action and or inaction of the Duke faculty in this case?
And to Mark… I believe Discovery in the civil trial will allow you to see the 15 or so Emails that surround the McFayden Email…that make it absolutely clear that:
On LS , we have been discussing this and other curious “coincidences” at that time. Sane Nurse “Kethra” on our Board points out:
“I would love to know about the “towel” that magically appears in the altered SANE fantasy novelette that Levicy puts together the DAY before Crystal (who in the hell waits a month to take a victims statement) remembers the towel in her formal statement. I find it fascinating that the towel was never mentioned until DNASI finds Evans DNA on it even though they never find his DNA anywhere else… ever.
So not only was Crystal coached, so was Levicy. I say this because as a SANE I am NEVER told about additional evidence that is removed from the scene. I rarely talk to anyone until and unless it goes to trial after my initial report is made. I have never had an investigator call me and say “hey you know we found xyz at the scene”.
Snip
DNASI does the towel, notifies Nifong that DNA matching David Evans found around March 30th (no match to Mangum however).
Tara Levicy shows up with her “amended” SANE narrative (against all known or imagined policy, procedure or guidelines) that NOW mentions the whole wiping off with the towel on April 5.
Mangum gives her written statement that magically matches Levicy’s word for word (that does NOT happen) and includes the towel April 6.
I think the 3 occurrences above are just a bit too pat to be believable.”
Others point out that after Crystal has failed in several attempts to make identification, on April 3 her Father Travis announces on National TV THE NIGHT BEFORE THE LAST LINE-UP…that she has picked three. Next day, April 4, she looks again and finds three (actually four) to ID.
On April 5 the NYT runs piece devoted to Finnerty, who has been selected the day before not yet been publicly named (setting up the ground for him to be seen as having a potential for violence?)
Why should Finnerty have been selected out of a possible 46 other players, for a single NYT piece devoted to him?
(Did someone have inside or advance word that he was to be selected?)
This is why we need these civil trials. There must be explanation, exposure and consequence.
OK, there you go again. If it really helps you to write these tirades, I guess that’s OK. I don’t have a whole lot to say about this one, except that I think you might consider challenging yourself to criticize what people really say instead of what you think they said. Here’s a couple of examples.
As far as “moral equivalence” goes, look at my response to Ralph DuBose.
“This vast consortium of conspirators lawsuit for example, gets my BS meter screaming. The vile email explained away as having no other motivation than a sarcastic literary reference to American Psycho.”
Help me out here:
Mark, what “motivation” do you ascribe to that Email ?
“Motivation” implies a move toward an intended action. What “action” do you suspect here?
Since there was no rape (you do believe now that there was no rape, don’t you?) what “motivation” could you think Ryan and those answering him had in mind?
I might ask how you… or anyone…. can ascribe anything to that Email without seeing the others before and after…that put it in context? What you THINK you know now cannot possibly be a complete picture without context, can it?
But you seem to believe, EVEN AT THIS POINT, that Ryan had some other “motivation.” for writing it other venting and tasteless frat-boy humor?
If we were to hack into private Email exchanges late at night of Duke’s basketball team or some post-fraternity party attendees of any hue…what kind of exchanges do you believe you’d see..some prayer chain or “Goodnight John-boy?”
If some legal entity with a “motivation” of his own…allowed you to spy tonight all over the Web at what young men of all colors and types write to their contemporaries…would you have widespread equal, LASTING disdain for all of them? Would you contemplate nefarious “motivations?”
How “different” are these Lacrosse players than you believe other guys are of their age? I suggest you volunteer in a local high school…read what is written in the men’s rooms, on the lockers, on the margins of the notebooks. Listen to how young men of all colors speak to each other, their girlfriends, and folks they both respect and disrespect. Listen to the lyrics of their music. Then you and I can discuss “vile” discourse in a broader context. We can discuss “motivations.” You can tell me why the Lacrosse team was treated as if they invented Stripper parties and “vile” Emails.
Maybe you can explain the overkill of condemnation for THESE particular boys…
THIS reflexive revulsion of yours , this enduring willingness to ascribe the worst possible “motivation”or explanation to these young men…is an example of the very real and permanent damage to every member of that team the civil suits will address.
Uh, Mark, just what do you think was the purpose of the McFadyen email? Was he really planning a murder, or did it really refer to the book American Psycho? (You might want to gander at the replies, as they followed the AP theme.)
The release of this email — which was private correspondence — was done for no other reason than to convince everyone in Durham that these lacrosse players were horrible, murderous people who surely must have been guilty of rape. Yet, we know now — and we knew then — what the email represented and what the truth about this case really was.
Your theme has been (1) there was no rape, but (2) the lacrosse players were so singularly horrible that they deserved everything they got and more. Both are a lie, even if you cannot admit the second one.
There is something else that no one has addressed, and that is the criminal conduct of the police, prosecutors, and DUMC personnel, namely Tara Levicy. Some real-live crimes (which the ancients once called felonies) were committed here, and from my reading of this blog, it seems that you and others think that was just fine. After all, you reason, these were horrible kids and so if police fabricate charges, lie to grand juries, lie to judges and everyone else, well that is just fine by you.
By the way, have you ever read some of the feminist blogs or other political blogs? The comments I have read on them make the McFadyen email look pretty tame. However, it seems that you are shocked, SHOCKED by the email, which strikes me as a bit strange, given your association with the hard left political groups in your area.
I have been around the block a few times, and I can tell you that a number of people in Durham who are in official positions of trust not only lied, but openly and willfully broke the law. I do find it strange that “good government” people like you believe that is perfectly acceptable.
Is it not strange that many of the same people who complain about the lawbreaking that goes on in the Bush administration and are demanding that scores of people go to jail are just fine with what happened in Durham? I hate to tell you, but lying to grand juries, fabricating medical reports, lying to judges, seeking false indictments, and the like are crimes. They are just as illegal as anything done by the Bushies, but from what I can tell, the good lefties of Durham are OK with official lawbreaking just as long as people who do not fall into “politically correct” categories are the targets.
I guess this is directed at me from the third paragraph on. It’s hard to tell, because most of what’s tied to the words “you” or “your” is bullshit (“Your theme has been…”, “it seems that you and others think…” “After all, you reason,…”, “given your association…”). I suppose that at least makes it on-topic.
You are cranky today aren’t you?
Here’s my deal with Davidson:
“The ad said that we faculty were listening to the anguish of students who felt demeaned by racist and sexist remarks swirling around in the media and on the campus quad in the aftermath of what happened on March 13 in the lacrosse house.
The insults, at that time, were rampant. “
SWIRLING. RAMPANT.
I just went with the visual…”swirling, RAMPANT remarks”…a vertible “cocoon ” in my mind’s eye….SWIRLING across campus in adoring, blind loyalty to the beloved Lacrosse team…as women and minorities were “anquished” by RAMPANT attacks on them.
Such is Davidson’s scenario of Springtime at Duke U 2006.
HUH?
This is the entirety of RAMPANT SWIRLING abuse she encountered on campus at that time? No other comments, or placards or wanted posters SWIRLED her way? Nothing?
There are none so blind as those who WILL NOT SEE. Or see beyond their own blind bias…
I’m sorry if I misquoted her; at least my reckless words will not cause her to have to sleep in her car.
Yeah, I guess I’m gonna have to be cranky on this one. Hopefully it’s better than sarcastic. There’s nothing to apologize for, though. I’m not Davidson’s enforcer or her PR agent—you can feel however you want about her and her editorial. Ayway, my suggestion is simple. Davidson claims that demeaning remarks were being made by people she saw as defenders of the lacrosse team. There’s nothing in the editorial about adoring, blind loyalty. Offhand, people who thought the best way to defend or support the lacrosse players was to insult minority students don’t sound to me like an adoring, cocooning crowd. Why isn’t it enough to be mad about the things Davidson really wrote?
I do not like to become argumentative about specific word choices. However, my complaint here is this: If you really wanted your readers to understand your point about no-moral-equivalence (and have them believe you meant it) I have trouble with the idea that you would choose the word “prosecutor” and others denoting dishonestly to label KC. My sense of this whole matter is that the distribution of guilty motives and actions between M. Nifong and KC Johnson is so extremely unbalanced (to the advantage of KC) that a fair description of them would not need to be amended or qualified with a “I do not mean they are morally equivalent” in the first place.
This has the same queasy-making feel about it as Mr. Red Mountain raising vague questions about the motivations behind the now infamous email. Of course, he can easily deny that he meant that they are actually criminal/rapists but since they are well known to be innocent, what is the point? Why start down a road of hints and allegations when everybody already knows it is a dead end? If you guys do not want to seem to be ascribing any moral equivalence to the two sides of this saga, use words that do the job instead of ones that tend to keep the water muddy.
Prosecutor is the word that means what I want to say. Inquisitor would work, too, but it’s kind of melodramatic. Prosecutors, even responsible ones—and it’s not a dirty work, you know—present evidence so that their audience can pronounce on guilt or innocence. An analyst, which is what Johnson claims to be, is supposed to serve up a broader, less agenda-driven understanding.
Professor Zimmerman,
I will admit to enjoying both your posts and your hospitality. Those sentiments alone keep me from expounding at greater length on how demeaned I myself feel by the sexist tendencies SWIRLING around this very blog… for example, when you refer to MY expressions of MY opinions as “tirades” and do not apply such terms to yourself or other male posters here.
Though I myself am the forgiving type, there are Babes in (your neck of the) Duke Woods who lay in wait for casual offenders like yourself.
Enjoy your weekend!
Thanks. Actually it’s Duke Forest, and I try to avoid going in there alone. I checked to see what I’ve used the word “tirade” for, and it’s a very small and select group—you shouldn’t feel singled out by gender on this one.
I’ve scrubbed a few irrelevant comments, as I don’t need the nuisance. They had to do with this. The parting shot from over there is too good to just toss away, though:
Consider yourself urged.
Robert,
The Diva is just giving you a humorous parody of the Vagina Monologues, there is no seriousness in that at all. Just some irony and sarcasm with a bit of humor on the side.
Joan,
The e-mail at the very least shows anger and resentment, just my opinion. It is BS to attempt to explain it away just as sarcasm, again my opinion. I don’t believe it was a suggestion to violence as Bill seems to believe it is possible I feel that way. That would get my BS meter screaming as well. Still it was beyond tasteless and my descriptive of “vile” is where my opinion remains.
Ralph,
I am not raising vague questions about that e-mail and I am sorry you have a ‘queasy’ feeling about my opinion. The e-mail itself gives me the creeps. I just don’t accept the BS, completely humorous and sarcastic literary explanation that is taken as a given by some people. Of the examples I gave of the BS coming from the defense side, it is interesting that that is the one example that gets people in such an uproar. I guess with Mr. Cooney now having gone over to the “Dark Side” and him giving some of his famous B-Spin on how Brodhead ‘helped’ one of the players, perhaps it is just more believable that the defense lawyers had dropped a few BS bombs of their own.
I like the last point. The attorneys who’ve worked on this case have been doing their jobs. Some better than others, for sure. I have to laugh, though, at the way they’re rolled into the good guys/bad guys framework—all the sniping at Gorelick, for instance.
As to “the Diva,” the less said the better, but that’s an interesting bit of info.
Actually, my comment was directed at Red Mountain and others who have tried either to say that “something happened” (that was how the Little Rascals defendants were wrongfully convicted, and “something happened” has no place in law) or that the lawbreaking by people from Durham and Duke was no big deal.
In other words, if police, prosecutors, and hospital personnel commit felonies in the name of pushing a certain political agenda, then they get a free pass. What I would hope is that people would want real justice and real commitment to rule of law, and not see law as a convenient weapon by which to make political points.
I have been a very harsh critic of the Bush administration’s assault on the law. (The Sami Al-Arian case by itself is proof that this administration makes up the law as it goes along.)
But, from what I read from certain people on this blog, and from Durham, is that since the defendants in the Duke case were not of the “proper” political backgrounds, whatever police and Nifong did was acceptable. Now, would you, Prof. Zimmerman, support fabrication of evidence to convict BLACK defendants of rape? My guess is that you would not, but you and your “progressive” friends in Durham are willing to give corrupt police and prosecutors a free pass when they do it to people you don’t like.
To me, that is unacceptable. I have tried (feebly, I admit) to be even-handed in the way I approach justice issues, and my Lewrockwell.com archive I think demonstrates that I have tried to support the causes of justice of people of all income, racial, and political backgrounds. I guess that in your view, that makes me a racist. So be it.
Thanks for the clarification. Sometimes it’s hard to tell in these comment threads. But then you do it again—more bullshit! I’d never brand someone as a racist for supporting “the causes of justice of people of all income, racial, and political backgrounds.” And the related question is too ridiculous to dignify with an answer.
Any comment on the “coincidences” I posted about the case in general?
Actually, I feel applying the word “tirade” to my posting is the language of male dominance, an example of elitist professorial privilege wherein an historically undervalued housewife…new to blogging…finds her thoughts defined and demeaned by gender bias code-words that carry a message of emotional excess signaling to like minded others to render them without merit or consequence.
Just saying…
I understood what you were saying—good thing I didn’t call you bitchy or whiny, huh? I have confidence that you’ll overcome and carry on.
I honestly don’t have any insight about those coincidences—anything I said would be uninformed speculation.
Sorry for splitting my reply, Robert. I also wanted to respond to Joan’s other question, which I feel is a legitimate one: “I might ask how you… or anyone…. can ascribe anything to that Email without seeing the others before and after…that put it in context? What you THINK you know now cannot possibly be a complete picture without context, can it?”
I wanted to find a post of yours that came to mind when you asked me that question. It dealt with Robert Steel and a quote from a bit of a conversation he had with Jason Trumpbour. I believe it was something like “It would be best for Duke if the three players went to trial. If convicted they can sort it out on appeal.” In that post you stated: “I’ve really tried to think of an alternative take on Chairman Steel’s words. Not to excuse or defend him but just because they astound me. I don’t know people who think like this. Maybe I don’t move in the proper exalted circles.
Thank God.”
I wonder what the context was for that quote of Steel’s? In any case, regardless of the context, it is hard to defend. He certainly sounds heartless and angry.
I feel the same way about that e-mail, Joan. It astounds me. It sounds heartless and angry. Still, you may be right about the context. Perhaps the discovery will not only shed some light on the context of the e-mail, but also the context of Steel’s quote.
Your comment elsewhere:
I think you are missing the point that I am making, Joan. My opinion in relation to the Bullshit topic, is that the completely harmless, innocent, humorous, literary reference interpretation of that e-mail is hard for me to swallow.
Well, Mark, of course, these guys did not come home from that tumultuous evening and begin a Oprah’s Book Club late night discourse on the literary merits of “American Psycho.” Is that what you think we all have been implying?
Really?
No, like the not-to-be mentioned Diva, they were taking quotes and allusions and using them to make some “clever” repartee…yes, to show their anger, disgust, etc. As in the “Diva” quote, they knew the other guys in their class “would get it.”
A quick example, in my real life I do not use profanity. I tell my children its a sign of an impoverished vocabulary. Now someone could lift my posts here and say I was expressing myself with the word “bullshit” publicly on the Internet. But we know how and why I chose to use it on this thread, don’t we? That does put my “conversion” in a different light.
These kids were reading a book that referenced “strippers”; they’d had an ugly night with strippers…so…the “joke was…hey, guys, lets do what the guy in the book we’re reading does.
Do I “approve?’ No, but I do not approve of using “bullshit” in a public forum either…yet here I am. I don’t even approve of teaching trash like “American Pyscho” at Duke in the first place. But Duke wants our kids to read those ideas, those words.
And I am neither nineteen nor teed off nor trying to impress the guys.
IMO the way that Email was used was more obscene than its contents , Mark. It was approved and released as a media distraction when Nifong realized he had no Player DNA in a three orifice rape.It was a tool to provide cover for a false prosecution that a Prosecutor KNEW had no credible evidence. It was used to sustain a Frame.
It was used to intimidate a nineteen year old to be frightened enough to perhaps lie and implicate innocent friends.
It was used to malign that young man’s reputation …to paint him as a sadist, a monster who was making that comment in deadly earnest.
The media grabbed it out of context and without explanation…and spun it into a serious threat, a sick desire to mutilate strippers..every word parsed to its most violent potential.
The media made it live for days. It defined the boys on the Team to the World.
Strange that none of the Duke professors who teach that course popped up to say, “Nah! Wait! I get it. I teach this stuff.”
So, Mark, have you a son? Suppose some dopey night he paraphrases some rap lyrics to a friend straight from one of those artistic musical endeavors that reference killing “cops”, calling women “hos”. Think about it. Some legal entity taps into his private Email and uses THOSE lyrics to define YOUR SON to the world.
You know that’s not him. Nothing like him.You find the words, the ideas… ugly, juvenile…but should he be branded “vile” forever by some stranger infected as YOU have been by early media? Should he bear the burden of those words for the rest of his life?
Look how you STILL react to those words. The McFayden family received over 1000 death threats the week after the Nifong-Stephens stunt.
Think of it! Imagine yourself in their place. Just so Nifong could keep this going through the Election cycle.
They were going to break this kid. They had ALL the emails. They knew the context. They KNEW it was no threat.
That is the most “vile” aspect in this story.
Think of having YOUR child endure this. Never be able to get out from under those misunderstood words. Fair-minded people like you who still brand Ryan with those words prove the necessity of the civil suits.
Is Steel’s quote a literary reference, a rap refrain? If I’ve missed it, let me know. Otherwise , help me out here….what other way can we parse the meaning of those two sentences?
“It would be best for Duke if the three players went to trial. If convicted they can sort it out on appeal.”
Help me…anyone? Anyone?
I’ve gotten into the habit, when these infamous lacrosse-case lines come up, of trying to find the source. According to Joan Foster (where have I heard that name before?), the line about what’s “best for Duke” is from Jason Trumpbauer’s report of a conversation he had with Steel (no ‘e’ at the end, btw). I didn’t find Trumpbauer’s own account of the conversation—if anyone has a link, please share. I certainly consider him a credible source, but still, I’m wary of drawing any conclusions about a quote like this without seeing it more in context. And that’s not because I think Steel meant something different and more benign than his many critics think he meant, it means that I don’t feel like I know what he meant, period.
To Mr. Red Mountain
I have not commented on the other subjects that you say smell of bullshit to you because they have to do with the private thoughts and intentions of the boys legal team. First of all, I cannot bring myself to care - they are lawyers hired by one side and its their job to use any ruse that does not create new crimes of their own even when the client is guilty. Second of all, the lawyers tried hard at the start to present their best case to Nifong which he rejected. Later on, when the State took over the case they opened their files to them. How often does this happen? And how pointless is it therefore to ascribe deviousness to them in this case?
As for the title of Most Perfect Bullshit, I nominate your repeated posing the question of what that email really meant. Because we know that you know that none of those guys did one harmful thing to Mangum. And so we know that you know it meant nothing - could mean nothing. I also strongly suspect that you have not forgotten how 19 year old guys create their humor. And so on yet another level, you are just bullshitting us about it.
Joan,
You said: “So, Mark, have you a son? Suppose some dopey night he paraphrases some rap lyrics to a friend straight from one of those artistic musical endeavors that reference killing “cops”, calling women “hos”. Think about it. Some legal entity taps into his private Email and uses THOSE lyrics to define YOUR SON to the world.”
I can’t count the number of times both you and cecilia have used that in a post. Since you either haven’t been listening or you just want to use that for the purpose of propping up your post, I don’t think I am going to respond to that again.
You said: “….but should he be branded “vile” forever by some stranger infected as YOU have been by early media? Should he bear the burden of those words for the rest of his life?”
I said the e-mail was vile. Good people are capable of sending ‘vile’ e-mails. I don’t think I went quite as far as you did in taking Steel’s statements and projecting that as a defining example of his character.
You said: “These kids were reading a book that referenced “strippers”; they’d had an ugly night with strippers…so…the “joke was…hey, guys, lets do what the guy in the book we’re reading does.”
I would hope nobody laughed at that joke.
You said: “It was approved and released as a media distraction when Nifong realized he had no Player DNA in a three orifice rape.It was a tool to provide cover for a false prosecution that a Prosecutor KNEW had no credible evidence. It was used to sustain a Frame.”
I agree.
Mr. Dubose,
You said: “First of all, I cannot bring myself to care - they are lawyers hired by one side and its their job to use any ruse that does not create new crimes of their own even when the client is guilty.”
As to the “hidden DNA”, it will certainly play a major part in several of the civil suits. It is certainly important both to Meehan and to DNASI at least if they remain as defendants in the lawsuits and the case/cases go to trial without being settled beforehand. It was also a major factor in the downfall of Nifong. Exactly how ‘hidden’ it was could be an important fact in dispute.
The e-mail may be important as well. I tend to agree with Joan on the use of this e-mail as a tool by Nifong, and the circumstances regarding how it was obtained and who provided it to the DA/DPD could be very important.
There is some BS in a few of my previous posts, you are very perceptive in that regard. However, there are many people that take a much more dim view of that e-mail than I do. And some see it as completely innocent. Perhaps the motivation behind this e-mail was important only so long as it had a connection to the case against the players. In that regard, I think you (and Joan) have made a valid point. Please consider however, that by becoming part of one of these lawsuits, the writer of that e-mail is knowingly throwing it out there for further discussion and public view.
Mark, has this become a contest where you won’t give because you think I won’t give?
I am asking you to have a little compassion for these kids and their families. To see them as no better than but NO WORSE than…most other young men of ANY HUE in their age group. To weigh their errors against what, for months and months, they had to endure. Not to canonize them. Never.
Since you say you often read my Liestopper posts…you may have read the one called “Overkill.”
http://liestoppers.blogspot.com/2007/02/overkill.html
I feel like I could have written this to you.
Here’s part of what I said on Feb.17, 2007:
I have never made excuses for the party, the “white shirt” comment. Never.
I never tried to “perfect” these guys. I am a Stage 3 Mother who learned the hard way that those who assume they have the recipe for raising perfect children are almost always left with a serving of humble pie.
I react to the disdain in your posts, the high-toned sneer whenever you reference these kids. I believe there is something about these boys that makes you feel they can never have suffered enough, never should receive one whit of compassion, and always should carry some permanent stain on their record of life from that party.
Am I wrong?
Jason Trumpbour made that comment on the old LS…which cannot be linked to now.
He posted…
But it is referenced in this 2007 article and in the civil suit.
http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/gaynor/071016
Thanks for the info—it’s nice to have a research staff. The post by Stuart Rojstaczer that Gaynor points to is good, too:
“I think you are missing the point that I am making, Joan. My opinion in relation to the “Bullshit topic, is that the completely harmless, innocent, humorous, literary reference interpretation of that e-mail is hard for me to swallow.”
By the way, Mark, it was “harmless” in that they were not planning to inflict physical harm on anyone; it was “innocent” since it neither preceded nor followed any crime; and it was “humorous” in the manner of dark humor associated with so much of the culture our children are surrounded with these days. And it was indeed a “literary reference.”
So what else bothers you?
More quotes and links on Steele:
http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2008/02/new-revelations-from-civil-suits.html
Jason Trumbour writing at FODU:
http://friendsofdukeuniversity.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html
Oct. 4, 2007
You know, I appreciate your hospitality. Most of the comments up put up are not warm and fuzzy affirmations of your own views. And you write well. And so I respect all of that.
But when you say you do not understand what Steels statement meant regarding the benefits to Duke if the three innocent LAX guys were to face the horror of a trial you make me wonder yet again why you are doing this. That comment of yours sounds as strange and un-natural as if you were a hostage or POW and were reading prepared propaganda at gunpoint. Is that it? Are you being forced by your boss to do this? I remember how American POWs liked to add subtle dashs of absurdity to propaganda works they were forced to participate in to alert fellow country-men that they did not really agree with the ideas expressed.
I say this because Steels comment (if accurately reported) is a perfect fit with the public actions of Duke at that time and a perfect fit with the obvious self interest Duke had in placating many powerful constituencies that would have been explosively angry at anything that looked like Dukes influence behind the case being dropped - iows the only safe outcome for Duke was it not be dropped. This is not hard to see. So, saying you are not sure about the context or the meaning of that statement is about absurd as an American POW pretending to be unable to correctly pronouce the name of their own hometown.
I don’t have any trouble understanding what the significance and meaning would be if Steel said that it would be “best for Duke if the three players went to trial. If convicted they can sort it out on appeal.” That’s how Joan put it, but it’s not an exact quote—there are no quotes of the conversation. It’s likely that if I could listen to a recording of it or read a transcript, I’d come to somewhat different conclusions that Trumpbauer. Offhand, whatever Steel said seems to have been grossly misguided at best.
On 10/4/2007 Jason Trumbour posted this on the FODU blog:
I consider Jason Trumpbour to be perfectly reliable. He has been prudent and cautious with all of his public statements. At least one reader of this blog is aware that I’ve kidded him about in the past about his caution. It’s hard to bel