But as I sort of predicted, Johnson shows the same commitment as William Anderson to a crude “metanarrative” that turns critics like Perkinson into an open book. For instance, “It’s telling that even a Group of 88 apologist like Perkinson doesn’t deny that the Group’s statements and actions, as well as those of local ‘activists,’ bolstered Nifong.” No, actually it’s not telling. On the other hand, it is telling that Johnson continues to rattle along in the mental ruts he’s been digging for more than two years, propping his criticism up with flypaper labels like “Group of 88 apologist.”

My cameo appearance is also telling in a funny way. “As a defender of the academic status quo, Perkinson seems unusually sensitive to criticism of his ideological comrades, and therefore inclined to inflate its presence—much like the Zimmerman blog, which falsely claimed that 50 percent of DIW’s posts were about the Duke professoriate.” I can’t speak for Perkinson, but it’s probably a fair point to make against me. What I wrote, though, was that “Roughly half of [DIW] is devoted to the way the case played out at Duke.” It’s typical of Johnson that he gives my casual estimate such false precision—literalists like it best when things are precisely wrong.

UPDATE: Speaking of ruts, Johnson has put a little note at the end of his post, a remarkably rich misreading of the two sentences just above:

I have been forwarded a post from Prof. Zimmerman in which he denies that his 50 percent total referred to the Duke professoriate, but merely was a reference to how the case affected Duke. It’s not clear to me how he determined his (incorrect) figure, but my apologies for assuming that this Group apologist referenced the faculty with his (incorrect) claim. Interpreted literally, around 98 percent of the posts on DIW refer to how the case affected Duke, since, of course, the case involved three people who at the time were students at Duke. (The remaining 2 percent are posts that deal with bookkeeping matters at the blog.)

I don’t know how anyone could so completely miss my straightforward point about false precision, but there it is. And then for some reason—a lack of alternative models, maybe, or simple opportunism—he treats my comments as a denial demanding correction and apology (they aren’t). The sarcastic apology is little more than a pretense to once again slap the “Group apologist” label on me. I’m not sure why he bothered, since by now his readers must know quite well what kind of cog I am in the machinery of Wonderland. Any new readers have to take his word for it or search, though—he has apparently decided that he’ll no longer dignify my blog with a link when he refers to me.

Apparently the powers that be at Liestoppers decided that if they had to restart their forums from scratch they could at least make lemonade from lemons by keeping certain “predictable annoyers” out of the ranks—on the TalkLeft forum there’s a sad exchange about the new clubbiness. Everyone’s agreeable on the thread that’s sending folks here, but it’s probably not the most representative sample, since it starts with a big smooch for William Anderson’s rebuttal of Robert Perkinson’s review of Until Proven Innocent (UPI) in The Nation online. A little ways down in the thread, lec suggests that Anderson might want to take a swing at me next, since I recently quoted Perkinson with approval. Here’s Anderson’s answer:

I’ll take a pass on this one. The problem is that there is only one “permissible narrative” when something like this comes up: everything has to be framed in the terms of white racism towards blacks (and everyone else who falls into the “color” category).

There can be no other framework of discussion. None. To try to work outside the permissible framework is seen as an act of racism itself.

This framework has benefited a lot of people individually (it has made Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton very wealthy men) and it provides a large number of college faculty jobs and jobs for people in government. As to whether or not it actually benefits the country, or even blacks (and whites) in general is quite another matter. I leave the answer to you.

Say what!? I’m not quite sure how to interpret this—it’s not clear what he’s referring to as “something like this.” My position is that it’s wrongheaded to force the case into any single narrative, and I don’t see how any halfway intelligent person could come away from my blog with the message that I think “everything has to be framed in the terms of white racism towards blacks.” Who’s policing the poor guy’s narratives and frameworks, anyway? And I don’t see any sign that he’s trying to reach outside of his fortified bubble, so what’s the discussion that can have no other framework, and with whom? I know just what it’s like to be told there’s just one “permissible framework” around the case, though—it’s a message I’m constantly getting from people who sound a lot like Anderson. No doubt plenty of the same single-minded, how-dare-you attitude has flowed in the other direction, but in what way has that stopped Anderson from expressing himself? At the moment he seems to have settled comfortably into a sycophantic discussion that’s completely on his own terms.

My experience lately has been of conservatives conjuring up bogeymen (and women) from the Left as a catch-all excuse for intellectual laziness—KC Johnson, Erin O’Connor, Alan Kors, and various commenters here and elsewhere. Anderson is yet another professor debating badly, and he’s about as unsubtle as you can get when it comes to marching out interchangeable ideological automatons from the “hard left.”

The title of Anderson’s article (“Two Angry Men or One Angry Leftist?”) is a play on Perkinson’s, which refers to the book’s coauthors, KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor (“Two Angry Men”). The angry leftist must be Perkinson, though the tone of his review is not at all irate. Roughly the first third of Anderson’s piece is about a different article by a different leftist, Mike Stark, and he really does sound angry. According to Stark, the disbarment of Mike Nifong “reeks of hypocrisy,” since up to that time the state bar had reacted with utter indifference to five death-penalty convictions that were “overturned because of flimsy evidence, unreliable witnesses and the outright illegal actions of prosecutors.” Nifong wasn’t, in Stark’s opinion, singled out because he did worse things than those other prosecutors, he was singled out because he took on people who could afford to fight back, in both the courts of law and of public opinion.

All of that sounds plausible to me, and it seems like Stark has reason to be infuriated. The funny thing is that so far it sounds like a routine post on the Liestoppers’ forum—it could easily be yet another of the symptom-of-a-sick-justice-system stories that are a staple over there if the scenario was moved, say, to Colorado, and the disgraced prosecutor was not Nifong but just some guy. And Stark’s cynical view of the motives behind Nifong’s official disgrace is consistent with the well-known line Perkinson quotes to sum up his “three obvious if oft-overlooked aspects of the case:”

First, Nifong’s spectacular downfall was more exceptional than his grandstanding and indifference to the truth. Second, “privileged white boys” are not commonly victimized by the criminal justice system, although “minority and poor defendants” are. And third, money makes all the difference; most wrongly targeted defendants, especially indigent ones, fare far worse than the well-heeled Blue Devils. Reade Seligmann, one of the exonerated players, makes the point succinctly: “If police officers and a district attorney can systematically railroad us with absolutely no evidence whatsoever, I can’t imagine what they would do to people who do not have the resources to defend themselves.”

For Stark, what adds insult to injury is that he doesn’t think Nifong’s case against the players was so bad after all, even if the prosecutor fumbled pursuing it. Anderson has no trouble shredding Stark’s attempt to show there was credible evidence for a prosecution. But that’s the only part of Stark’s article that Anderson seems to have noticed, and with one angry leftist dispatched to his pigeonhole, Anderson turns to the other. He notes that Perkinson is a slight improvement, since

[a]fter all, he was willing to admit that there was no rape, which is better than Mike Stark did in the hard-left CounterPunch last year, when he claimed that DAMN really was the wronged party and that Reade Seligmann, David Evans, and Collin Finnerty most likely had done everything to Crystal Mangum that DAMN said they did.

DAMN, in case you haven’t guessed, is District Attorney Mike Nifong. In the same spirit of open-mindedness, Anderson cites its “uncritical support [for] Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Castro” when he introduces the Nation in his first paragraph. The rhetorical stew is bubbling along nicely by the time he drops Perkinson in.

Both Stark and Anderson are in the grip of what liestoppers like to call “metanarrative.” It’s a perfectly good word for the over-arching schematic frameworks that are supposed to capture the deep truths about how the world works. In the lacrosse controversy, though, it’s been reduced to little more than a pretentious codeword for the deep-seated need of mindless leftists to milk race, class, and gender bias for all they’re worth and then some. I’m tempted to keep it in scare quotes. Instead, I’ll just note that most of us are using the term loosely.

Among the perspectives I’ve come across on the lacrosse incident, I think it’s the potbangers that offer the best example of what’s conventionally called a metanarrative. What I find most troubling about the use they make of it is the dehumanizing effects both of vilifying the accused and, more insidiously and ironically, of sanctifying the accuser. A general problem when metanarratives are applied to real-world events is that people tend to be turned into puppets or stereotypes. Wahneema Lubiano describes how the actors in an incident or conflict can be “perfected” in order to give the metanarrative its full resonance. If, for instance, in Stark’s metanarrative justice is a luxury reserved for the rich and powerful, his narrative of Nifong’s disgrace is more compelling if the lacrosse players aren’t just relatively lucky victims of an unethical prosecutor but rich kids who’s freedom was bought with daddy’s cash while innocent poor folks were left to rot in jail. Whether or not that’s what’s going on in Stark’s head is pure speculation—all I can say is that I find it plausible, and I think that people with a strong sense of metanarrative tend to do that sort of thing.

That kind of puppeteering is subtle compared to Anderson’s flagrant typecasting. His metanarrative, if it can still be called that, is more like a conspiracy theory involving whoever’s enforcing and prospering from the one “permissible narrative”—the unholy alliance of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and a bunch of lefty professors, for a start. Anderson write as if he’s familiar with Perkinson. It’s a familiarity that can’t come from the article itself, but seems to reflect what Anderson thinks he knows about the sort of person who wrote it. Perkinson might “admit that there was no rape,” but only with regret, because he wants nothing more than to nail the lacrosse team as symbols of “unfettered ‘white privilege’.” His “shots at the players” are efforts at “demonization,” and “anything short of declaring them the Very Spawn of Satan simply will not do for The Nation and its hard-left readership.” Which is to say, there’s no need to pay much attention to Perkinson’s text if you understand his program, and Anderson reads his program loud and clear. KC Johnson is also adept at looking through a text to the agenda and mindset he’s sure is behind it. It seems like it would be embarrassing for men with PhDs to let a crude metanarrative do their thinking for them—kind of like showing up in eighth grade with training wheels on your bicycle—but it doesn’t seem to cause them any trouble.

Really the thing that’s ailing Anderson and Johnson isn’t an out-of-control metanarrative, it’s tribalism—it’s personal identification with a cause and with a group, and facile typecasting of the Other, not an intellectual commitment to a rigid theory. And my guess is that in an emotionally charged scandal like the lacrosse case, what looks like blind faith in a metanarrative is likely to involve a touch of tribalism, or maybe a heaping dollop of it.

Anderson sets the rabble-rousing hyperbole aside to point out that it’s quite misleading for Perkinson to claim that in one year, according to the Coleman report, “25 percent of [Duke’s] disorderly conduct violations” were from lacrosse players—it’s a statistic with a sample size of 4, basically meaningless. That’s Anderson’s single piece of factual criticism that sticks. He doesn’t do so well on another point of fact: Perkinson’s claim that Taylor and Johnson don’t discuss the Darryl Hunt case in their chapter about wrongful convictions. Anderson calls the claim “dishonest,” and seems full of confidence that he knows how these angry leftists go about their business:

Actually, they did highlight the Hunt case, and I did as well. However, to have found out that small but important fact would have required that Perkinson actually have read the book instead of just lambasting it as a right-wing tirade.

I was already wondering about this—in the N&O blog thread berating Tim Tyson a few weeks ago, a commenter mentioned a discussion of the Hunt case in UPI. I don’t own the book, but I happened to be near a bookstore this morning. What I found is that there is no entry in the index for “Hunt, Darryl,” and there’s no section about him in the chapter Perkinson is referring to (the link is to the source notes for UPI, where a search will find “witch hunt” several times but no “Darryl Hunt”). Johnson himself says that he and Taylor “mentioned the Hunt case,” so it must be in the book somewhere, but to say they highlighted it is quite a stretch. (It’s clear that I’ve spent way too much time with this stuff because I can just hear Johnson’s indignant tirade about “extraordinarily strong charges … against a fellow academic” if the shoe was on his foot—it plays in my head in the voice of David Frye imitating Richard Nixon on a record I used to love when I was a kid).

So… dishonest? Didn’t read the book? As everyone knows, when it comes to the lacrosse case, It’s Not About the Truth.

[KC Johnson has now posted a rebuttal to Perkinson’s review.]