{"id":21622,"date":"2013-08-14T00:02:32","date_gmt":"2013-08-14T05:02:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=21622"},"modified":"2013-08-13T11:07:17","modified_gmt":"2013-08-13T16:07:17","slug":"qotd-our-postmodern-angst","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/08\/14\/qotd-our-postmodern-angst\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Our Postmodern Angst"},"content":{"rendered":"

Much has been written about Rachel Jeantel, routinely described as the prosecution\u2019s \u201cstar witness\u201d in the George Zimmerman trial, almost as if she were some sort of new-generation civil-rights icon. Jeantel has been variously praised by liberals for her street smarts, and lamented by conservatives as emblematic of the tragic detours of the Great Society. Both agree that in some sense she is a victim of the social forces that for decades now have been forging an underclass.<\/p>\n

Perhaps \u2014 but from her testimony and her post-trial interviews for hire, we learned that Ms. Jeantel was confident and savvy about using electronic media while at the same time apparently illiterate, given that she could not read \u201ccursive.\u201d Yet whose fault is it that she preferred to post obscenities rather than scroll over to a book? Jeantel\u2019s worldview appears anti-liberal to the core. She admitted that her original testimony under oath was not fully accurate: Trayvon Martin, we now learn, wanted to \u201cwhoop ass\u201d and so threw the first blow against Zimmerman. Yet Jeantel did not say that at the trial; she was quite willing to see the defendant convicted on false testimony.<\/p>\n

Jeantel was unapologetic about her use of \u201cretarded\u201d as a putdown, her preposterous homophobic accusations that George Zimmerman could have been some sort of crazed gay rapist, and her casual use of slurs like \u201cbitch,\u201d \u201cnigga,\u201d and \u201ccrazy ass cracker.\u201d True, Jeantel is impoverished and no doubt \u201cunderserved\u201d by a host of government agencies entrusted with providing support to the less well off. Yet by both past American and present global standards, she is not victimized in the sense of suffering hunger, unaddressed health problems, or lack of access to technology.<\/p>\n

In today\u2019s topsy-turvy world, we are to emphasize the untruth that Ms. Jeantel is poor in the Dickensian sense, while ignoring the truth that her matter-of-fact worldview is by contemporary liberal benchmarks homophobic, racist, and misogynistic \u2014 and entirely contrary to the race-blind meritocracy that a much poorer, much more heroic generation of civil-rights leaders once sacrificed for.<\/p>\n

From 1619 to 1865, African-Americans in a large region of North America were enslaved. For the century following the Civil War, they were deprived in the South of civil rights that were supposed to be accorded citizens of the United States, and elsewhere were often subjected to insidious racism. In the last half-century, a vast private effort has sought to change the American psyche while a vast public one has used government resources to attempt to redress racist legacies. These are elemental issues of good and evil that are at the heart of the human experience and must continue to be addressed \u2014 but not in the manner of our era of psychodramatic trivialization.<\/p>\n

Victor Davis Hanson, “Our Postmodern Angst”, National Review<\/em><\/a>, 2013-08-13<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Much has been written about Rachel Jeantel, routinely described as the prosecution\u2019s \u201cstar witness\u201d in the George Zimmerman trial, almost as if she were some sort of new-generation civil-rights icon. Jeantel has been variously praised by liberals for her street smarts, and lamented by conservatives as emblematic of the tragic detours of the Great Society. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,41,13],"tags":[343,198,99,605],"class_list":["post-21622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-crimeandpunishment","tag-equalrights","tag-racism","tag-slavery"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5CK","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21622"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21622\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21623,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21622\/revisions\/21623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}