Another American “tragedy”
Laurium writes:
This is from a movie review in Time Magazine online. They are reviewing the last movie of the NYC actress, Adrienne Shelly, who was killed last year by a Hispanic illegal alien in her apartment building. She had walked downstairs and asked that he stop making so much noise remodeling a apartment. We know the gory details and his motivation because he “fessed up and told the police.
But that is not the spin from Time. To them he is not a macho man from a patriarchal culture. He is not an illegal alien who killed her so she could not complain and get him deported. To Time he was “a construction worker” and it was a “stupefyingly banal crime.” Think “fluke occurrence.” Think “no one could have predicted.” Think “tragedy.” Like a stroke of lightning out of the blue sky. Hell, if you read carefully it wasn’t even a human that did it. It was the “result of an argument.”
The lengths the liberal media will go to protect illegals is truly stupefying. Here is the link:
“Adrienne Shelly was murdered last November in her New York office. It was one of those stupefyingly banal crimes—the result of an argument with a construction worker—that preoccupy the tabloids and make the rest of us think long, hard and miserably about how thin and how carelessly drawn the line between life and death is. You leave home in the morning thinking about the weather, your dinner plans for the evening, the phone call you really don’t want to return—and you don’t come home. Ever.”
LA replies:
Shelley’s death is “stupifyingly banal.” Time movie reviewer Richard Schickel in his precious way is stupified by how meaningless and random the murder is, instead of being outraged by the depravity of the person who did it, and by the disorder that becomes normal when a society undercuts all morality, law, and authority, while also allowing its cities to fill up with lawbreakers from foreign countries who have no legitimate connection to this country—the whole process having been cheered on by Time itself over the last several decades. A couple of years ago Time had a cover that reveled in the image of the U.S. Mexican border region as a place of hideous ugliness and chaos, thus perfectly combining the liberal ideals of moral nihilism within and open borders without. Yet Shickel has the audacity to attribute Shelley’s death to some general randomness of existence, rather than to the specific disorders that our own governmental and cultural elites have encouraged.
Schickel’s bad faith is shown by his covering up of both the killer’s illegal status and his deliberate murder of Shelley. He sounds every relativist note except for saying that Shelley was “in the wrong place at the wrong time,” which would have sounded pretty strange since she was killed in her own office. Yet President Bush did Schickel one better. He actually said in his speech at Virginia Tech that the people slaughtered by Cho Sueng-Hui were “in the wrong place at the wrong time,” when in fact they were in their classrooms, doing what they were supposed to be doing, and the killer even chained shut the building before he began killing them so that they wouldn’t be able to escape. But, you see, once you subscribe to the modern liberal view of the universe as a senseless chaos in which there is no such thing as evil (except of course for the evil of terrorists) and in which randomness rules everything (“how thin and how carelessly drawn the line between life and death is”), the only reason for anything bad happening to anyone is that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
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David B. writes:
I was watching the coverage of the VT massacre when a clip of GWB’s speech came on. He intoned, “They did not deserve to die. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time.” I thought, “Doesn’t Bush have a speechwriter who can come up with better lines than this?” On second thought, I realized that this is what Bush, as a good liberal, wanted to say. It’s the same when he says things like, “Family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande. They do jobs Americans aren’t doing.”
The standard cliché of “they were in the wrong place at the wrong time” has been trotted out at many vicious murders. It was used in a news report about the Knoxville atrocity and regarding Ron Goldman.
Alan Levine writes:
I was most impressed by your remarks on Richard Schickel’s take on the Shelley murder (or was it just a premature death by argument?) I at first thought you were making too much of the inanities about “tragedy,” but I now think you were right.
I must say I had not heard George Bush’s brilliant point that the Virginia Tech victims were at the “wrong place at the wrong time” while going about getting an education. Or was it a Freudian semi-slip, a man thinking that he himself is indeed in the wrong place at the wrong time? (That is, the White House.)
Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 29, 2007 11:42 PM | Send