Re:harmonized

Here’s a quick follow-up to my last entry. KC Johnson has just posted to Durham-in-Wonderland his own rebuttal to Robert Perkinson’s review of Until Proven Innocent. There’s some substance to it, including a few paragraphs about the Hunt and Gell cases that go beyond the I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I rhetoric of his recent feud with Tim Tyson.

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.

A few weeks ago I wrote about Tim Tyson’s answers to a reporter’s questions about the lacrosse case, and about KC Johnson’s response (the interview with Tyson, originally on a News & Observer blog, made it into print a few days later). Among other things I was disappointed that Tyson wasn’t willing to think more deeply and self-critically about the hype and misrepresentation from the authorities early in the investigation, and the statements he made because he found it convincing.

Tyson did even worse when he lashed back at criticism from Johnson and others in the comment thread to the interview, fighting fire with fire using one of Johnson’s favorite low budget ad hominem attacks. It’s a device that I’ve noticed in Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW) and elsewhere, so it caught my eye when Michael Bérubé mentioned it in the back-and-forth that followed a post about Phyllis Schlafly on Crooked Timber (a debate I wrote about a while back). “[I]n the midst of a discussion of X [someone] demand[s] that the people criticizing X answer his (or her!) peremptory question as to why people are not also criticizing Y.” I agree with Bérubé that there should be a name for people who do this, or at least a name for the maneuver. Here’s the first of two times Johnson does it in his first blast at Tyson:

Ironically, at almost the same time as the vigil, Mangum was videotaped at the Platinum Pleasures Club, dancing in a most limber fashion. No evidence exists that Tyson has ever protested against the Pleasures Club, or has called for local or state government authorities to shut down exotic dancing establishments, even though the women in such establishments are, presumably, “somebody’s daughter and somebody’s sister and somebody’s mother and somebody’s sweetheart.”

It doesn’t take a very close or sympathetic reading of Tyson’s comments about the lacrosse case to see how vacuous this particular point is (worse than vacuous, actually, with the prim but snide, and ultimately gratuitous, juxtaposition of candlelight vigil and “most limber” pole dancing). Continue reading ›

It’s interesting to see how bits of news reverberate through the blogosphere. Thanks to some saved searches in my Google reader, I’ve seen a number of lacrosse-case stories make the rounds. The bigger ones have generated some lasting buzz—the motion from Duke’s side to shut down the Duke Lawsuit website, the surreal news the accuser, Crystal Mangum, graduated this spring with a degree in Police Psychology, and the Duke lacrosse team in the playoffs, which was a nice run that’s just ended prematurely (I hope the right kind of attention was therapeutic for the team and the school, though). Smaller developments have some briefer in-group echos—I wrote about the ones that followed the belated blast at an article about the controversy that KC Johnson posted on Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW) last month. Late last week I had a feeling that I’d soon be seeing something along the same lines when an interview with Duke professor Tim Tyson about his role in the scandal popped up. And Johnson was indeed quick to give it the treatment. I’m too damn slow and verbose to get in early in the cycle, but I’m trying to do my part.

The News and Observer ran a profile of Tyson about a week ago, highlighting his efforts to “build community across the lines of race and ethnicity.” Readers wrote in to suggest that the paper should have brought up his role in the lacrosse case, so J. Peder Zane emailed Tyson some questions and put the answers on his blog. Tyson alludes to inaccuracies in the early press coverage and suggests that if he’d had a better picture he might have spoken a little differently. But on reflection, he says he “would not go back and change what [he] said very much.” And to some extent I can see why—some of the things he said were, in my opinion, very much on target. Others not so much.

In a short editorial that ran in the N & O on April 2, 2006, Tyson pinpoints the willingness to treat people as things as the real problem with the lacrosse team’s ill-fated party, and as the central issue raised by the case. Probably I’d be able to agree with him wholeheartedly if cooler heads had prevailed at the outset and Nifong hadn’t turned the investigation and prosecution into a fiasco. As it happened, insult was piled on injury. But as a way for people with cash to deal with people who need it, the transaction that night was grotesque, starting with the call to an “escort” (i.e., prostitution) service in which the caller lied about how large the party would be. Continue reading ›