Wait a Gersh-Darn Minute...

As a fresh-faced and gullible student at the University of Pittsburgh, I was drawn into the campus leftist milieu, an environment that seemed to valorize my indignation about my youthful economic insecurity and the general lack of respect I received from the adult world. In the process, I learned quite a bit about both domestic and foreign affairs, which helped to sustain the illusion that there wasn't real debate or disagreement in politics, just misunderstanding between the enlightened left-leaning community and the prejudicially ignorant patriotic jingoists of America that could be overcome with enough education. Unfortunately, it made sense especially since most of the professors were some stripe of left-liberal and the only conservative voices you typically heard were from that barely articulate segment of the student body that had yet to fully assimilate itself.

I've been living in Washington DC for a little over 2 years currently, and I realize a lot more about the nuance required to have a serious political discussion. I am roundly convinced that on most campuses, one simply cannot have such a discussion. The culture of most do not exist to cultivate a sense of civic virtue so much as to outdo one another with how self-righteously radical one can be. And no one was better at that at Pitt than John Lacny.

Lacny gained a reputation as a leader of the student left for the work he did in founding the labor solidarity organization Students in Solidarity. (Its initials were SIS, but many people thought they were resurrecting the spirit of another student leftist organization with three-letter initials, two of which were also 'S.') It is difficult to recall in one sitting the full breadth of the cacophony of distorted, paranoid conceptions of the world that this man could bark. Perhaps it was his utterly unironic, pompous demeaner that attracted so much respect in individuals who were separated from the serious moral authority of their parents for the first time in their lives. No one ever seemed to speak with John as an equal, he was always in the role of mentor.

On one occasion, he was going on that in the 1980s foreigners looked at workers in the United States as simply victims of capitalist fat cats, but in the early 21st century workers are perceived as just as culpable for American crimes as the ruling class. I casually asked, "what would you attribute that to?" His only response was an impatient grimace.

So, a few years out of college and with a different perspective on the world, I decided (just for kicks) to revisit Mr. Lacny's cognitive processes at work. He currently runs a blog entitled "It's No Accident," in which he makes Marxist commentary on a variety of current affairs. Most recently, he posted a letter to the editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette concerning the public reception of Michael Vick's dog-fighting charges. He alleges that there is a racist double standard in the public mind, constasting the "vituperation" of Post-Gazette readers to the apparent lack of condemnation of Florida boot camp guards for the death of Martin Lee Anderson or the dearth of sympathy for the Jena Six. He ends the letter asking rhetorically, "could it be that some of white America puts a higher value on the lives of dogs than on the lives of young black men?"

My question in all of this is, how would it have been possible to express any legitimate revulsion at Vick's acts, according to Lacny? Would it have been possible at all? There appears to be no such thing as simply condemning Vick's actions in isolation. They immediately have to be compared and contrasted to other events that have no particular relation to what Michael Vick did to construct the image of "some of white America" (who may or may not have even been following those other events) as vile dehumanizers of blacks. Does anyone really believe that the readers condemning Vick wrote their denunciations calculatingly ignoring this or that offense against American blacks? Are we really expected to accept the implied conclusion that those readers value the lives of dogs over human beings? Do we even know how many of said readers were white?

Lacny received one comment on his post that points out that the comparison cases he mentions are not quite as morally unambiguous as he presents them, but adds afterwards that, "it is sick and undeniable though that in the media pets are more important than people, and whites are more important than blacks." This may or may not be true of the media, but Lacny points the finger at a section of white America, not the media. I'm sure some of white America does think that blacks are subhuman. There are in fact hard-right racist organizations functioning the United States. But, in essence, accusing a random slice of the white public of tacitly subscribing to those ideas because some of the Post-Gazette's readership felt comfortable roundly condemning a clear case of cruelty towards animals is absurdly grasping at straws.

The saddest part of the entire thing is that Lacny, having spun these implications out of thin air, will walk way believing the story he's told himself about the attitudes of white Americans and take the lessons learned to the next event that he can show as being an egregious instance racism, sexism, homophobia or whatever other sinful rabbit can be pulled out of the magic rhetorical hat.