The Dominican nanny’s life was “in chaos” before she killed the Krim children; did the Krims notice?

Since immigration is a vast phenomenon involving millions of human beings, it would be astonishing if there were not many good and wonderful things to be said about it. And these things have, of course, been said for many years, but in such emotional and all-embracing terms that they paralyze critical thought. Since the American mind is already soaked with open-borders clichés, true balance only requires us to show how those clichés are wrong.
— Lawrence Auster, Huddled Clichés, 1997

It’s the usual New York Times treatment of a nonwhite murderer of whites: She was troubled, her life was disordered, unravelling, “in chaos.” No one ever asks: Along with their good human qualities, how much human dysfunction, disorder, and potential and actual evil have we brought into this country by importing tens of millions of Third-Worlders and putting them into close proximity with white Westerners who are so much better formed and favored as human beings than themselves and whom they can never equal? Starting with the 1914 murder of Frank Lloyd Wright’s mistress and six other people by Wright’s Negro house servant from Barbados, Julian Carlton,—whose life was also no doubt “troubled” and “in chaos”—how many white Americans have been murdered over the last hundred years, and especially over the last fifty years, by nonwhite immigrants? The phenomenon is never remarked on. As far as public consciousness is concerned, the phenomenon doesn’t exist, any more than the ongoing campaign of black-on-white savagery exists.

Life Was in Chaos for Nanny Accused of Killing 2 Children
By N. R. KLEINFIELD and WENDY RUDERMAN

She was unraveling. Yoselyn Ortega’s home was an overcrowded tenement that she yearned to leave. She shared the apartment with her teenage son, a sister and a niece, and roamed the halls selling cheap cosmetics and jewelry for extra money. She had been forced to relinquish a new apartment for her and her son and move back. A woman had chiseled her on a debt. Neighbors found her sulky and remote. She seemed to be losing weight.

Yoselyn Ortega—the disorder and darkness
the Krims didn’t see.

Juan Pozo, 67, a car service driver who used to rent a room in her apartment, said he spoke to her sister on Friday, who told him that Ms. Ortega had not been feeling well lately, “that she felt like she was losing her mind.”[LA replies: Did Marina Krim notice that there was something wrong with Yoselyn Ortega, which apparently everyone else who knew her had noticed? Evidently not. Mrs. Krim was so happy with her life, happy with her adorable children, that for her everything in her life, including her Dominican employee “Josie” and Josie’s Dominican family and even the whole Dominican Republic, was “wonderful!!” and “amazing!!” So how could she have any premonition of the darkness that was brewing in her children’s nanny?]

He said the family had taken her to see a psychologist, an account shared by others, including the police.

This was the unfinished portrait that began to emerge on Friday of Ms. Ortega, the Manhattan nanny who, the authorities said, committed the unthinkable.

On Thursday evening around 5:30, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said, Marina Krim returned to her Upper West Side apartment with her 3-year-old daughter to discover her two other children, a 2-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl, dead of knife wounds in the bathtub and Ms. Ortega slashing herself with the same bloodied kitchen knife used on the children.

Ms. Ortega, 50, survived, but the police have been unable to question her because she remains in the hospital in a medically induced coma, a deep stab wound in her throat. She has not yet been charged.

The authorities remain mystified over the motive. Paul J. Browne, the chief police spokesman, said family members had told detectives that Ms. Ortega “over the last couple of months was not herself.”

“She was, according to others, seeking some professional help,” he said, adding, “There were financial concerns.”

Ms. Ortega, who the police said was a naturalized American citizen from the Dominican Republic, had worked for the Krims for about two years. She had been referred by another family, the police said, and did not come through an agency, which customarily does background checks. A law enforcement official said Ms. Ortega had had no previous brushes with the law, nor have detectives learned of any tensions in her relationship with the Krims.

“No fighting with the mom, the family, the kids,” the official said. “Everybody is looking for a reason here.” He added, “We’ve got nothing bad other than the fact that she killed two children.”

On Friday, the sort of memorial with stuffed animals and flowers that has become sadly familiar in the aftermath of a city tragedy took shape outside the Krim apartment building, as parents pondered what to say to their own children. Disbelief was pervasive in the neighborhood.

“I don’t have words for something like that,” said William Davila, whose daughter is a fifth grader at Public School 87, which Lucia Krim, 6, had attended. The children’s father, Kevin Krim, was returning from a business trip on Thursday when he was met by the police at the airport.

Mr. Krim learned that his youngest child, Leo, and his daughter Lucia, known as Lulu, had died and that the police had arrested the nanny with whom the Krims were so close that they had traveled to her home in the Dominican Republic. He is an executive at CNBC. Ms. Krim did not work outside the home, but taught an occasional art class at the Museum of Natural History. On Thursday night, CNBC put the Krims up in a hotel.

Mr. Krim’s father, William Krim, 74, said the parents had not returned to their apartment.

“I don’t know if they ever will,” he said. “I don’t know if I could.”

A spokeswoman for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Dr. Charles S. Hirsch, said Lucia had died of “multiple stab and incise wounds,” and Leo of “incise wounds of the neck.” They had been clothed, a law enforcement official said, suggesting that Ms. Ortega had not been bathing the children.

For about 30 years, according to neighbors, Ms. Ortega has lived in a six-story tenement building at 610 Riverside Drive in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood in Upper Manhattan. Before the nanny job, they said, she had worked in factories and as a cleaning lady. A neighbor said the sister she lived with was a taxi driver.

This year, Maria Lajara, 41, a friend who lives in the building, said Ms. Ortega had stopped by to tell her how happy she was that she had found a new apartment in the Bronx for herself and her son. She said that Ms. Ortega had conveyed how much she loved working for the Krims and that she was paid and treated well. Also this year, she said, the Krims had given Ms. Ortega an Ann Taylor jacket as a gift.

Nannies who work near one another often form social networks, setting up joint play dates or meeting at playgrounds. But most other nannies in the Krim building said they were unfamiliar with Ms. Ortega.

One nanny, Terla Duran, 35, said she did not know Ms. Ortega, but a friend who is a nanny did.

“Not many of us knew her; they say she was very strange,” Ms. Duran said. “She spent most of her time locked up inside the apartment.”

Once she moved to the Bronx, Ms. Ortega stayed in touch with Ms. Lajara, her friend. She would tell Ms. Lajara to save copies of a religious magazine, Rayo de Luz, which Ms. Ortega’s sister would then take to her.

Twice, Ms. Ortega asked Ms. Lajara to pray that a woman would pay her for makeup she had given her to sell. The amount, Ms. Lajara said, was about $100, and it was important to her.

Within the past few months, Ms. Ortega returned to live with her sister. Fernando Mercado, the superintendent of the building on Riverside Drive, said she had been renting the Bronx apartment from an acquaintance who moved to the Dominican Republic. But the tenant returned and threw out Ms. Ortega. “She spent a lot of money on the Bronx apartment,” Mr. Mercado said of Ms. Ortega.

Neighbors on Riverside Drive said that in recent weeks, Ms. Ortega had looked older, anxious, harried. Ruben Rivas, one of the neighbors, described her as “kind of devastated.”

He last saw her two weeks ago. “She was in bad shape,” he said. “Skinny.”

Neighbors said she walked faster in the hallways and was withdrawn. She had been known as a gregarious woman who, they said, greeted them with shouts of “Hola, vecina”—“Hello, neighbor.” But now, they said, she avoided eye contact and said little.

Kenia Galo, 25, who has known her all her life, would see her in the elevator lately and remark that she looked tired.

“I am tired,” she would reply. “Work.”

Neighbors said she would leave the building at 5:30 or 6 a.m. and not return for 12 hours.

Ana Bonet, 40, a neighbor, said that besides her nanny job, Ms. Ortega sold inexpensive jewelry and makeup to neighbors. Others said she also earned money by cooking rice and chicken dishes for parties.

The Krim parents were both Californians who have been married for about nine years. Ms. Krim grew up in Manhattan Beach, and Mr. Krim in Thousand Oaks, where he was a football star. He worked at McKinsey & Company in Los Angeles and she worked for a wholesaler of powders; they met at an Italian restaurant in Venice Beach.

Mr. Krim took a job at Yahoo in San Francisco, where they lived before moving to New York about three years ago. After first being employed at Bloomberg L.P., Mr. Krim moved to CNBC.

According to Mr. Krim’s parents, Ms. Ortega was hired about six months after the Krims came to New York. They did not know what vetting the couple did.

“We’re just the most stunned people in the world—I mean, they treated this woman so well,” said William Krim, who lists Marina Krim in his cellphone as “World’s Best Mom.”

Though Ms. Krim did not work outside the home, Mr. Krim’s parents said, they wanted a nanny to help out. Sometimes, Ms. Krim would take the two oldest children out with her, leaving the youngest with Ms. Ortega, whom they called Josie.

An acquaintance of Mr. Krim said he had been extremely happy in California and often lamented the difficulties of family life in New York and how it was necessary for a big family to have help.

Mr. Krim’s mother, Karen Krim, said Ms. Krim was a hands-on mother. “They’re both very careful,” she said. “She didn’t even leave the kids that much alone with this nanny; that’s the irony of all this.”

She added: “She didn’t have a nanny so she could go out and play tennis—not that there’s anything wrong with that. But she was always with the kids, and Josie just helped her because, with three little kids, it’s really hard.”

When the Krims took family vacations, they paid to fly the nanny to Santo Domingo to visit her family. One time, they accompanied her because Ms. Ortega wanted them to meet her family. Marina Krim maintained a blog, on which she chronicled “life with the little Krim kids.”

Charlotte Friedman, a retiree who lives in the Krims’ building, may have been the last person to see the children alive. She did not know the members of the family, but would periodically bump into them. Around 5 p.m. on Thursday, she said, she entered the elevator, heading for her seventh-floor apartment, at the same time as the nanny and the children.

She asked the girl if she had been on a play date. The child replied that she had been dancing. Ms. Friedman described the girl as “happy, happy, happy.”

The times she had encountered Ms. Ortega, she found her cold. There in the elevator, she said, the nanny smiled but said nothing. And then, she and the children got off on the second floor.

- end of initial entry -

Gintas writes:

A paragraph that’s missing from the NYT article:

Ortega would sometimes come home with a copy of the New York Times and a bottle of Thunderbird, and sit at the table reading and drinking, a friend noted. She would brood over the cosmic injustices dealt her way: a minority in a white land, the relentless privileged happiness of the Krim family, her own degraded state of semi-poverty. She would sometimes pace the apartment waving her hands and shouting out curses at “the white man” and “those damned Krims.” Her friend said, “she needed help.”

Wanda S. writes:

I don’t know if I agree with your diagnosis of this case. Yoslyn Ortega doesn’t seem to fit the profile of a deracinated Third World immigrant who can’t cope with life in the affluent West.

The story states that she lived at the same address in the Bronx for 30 years—she’s not a recent immigrant, she’s lived in New York most of her life. They make much of the fact that she lived in a “crowded tenement,” but the only photos I’ve seen of her home (the hallways outside her apartment) shows a perfectly ordinary apartment building, not the rundown, rat-infested pile the loaded word “tenement” would suggest. And although the parents didn’t hire her through an agency, which would have done a background check, she has no criminal record, and has never been in trouble with the police. I question whether a security check would have been of any help. And is it typical for nannies to have psychological testing before they’re hired? That might have exposed mental instability, but it’s too early to tell if even that would have weeded her out. There are some conflicting reports—people who saw her recently describe her as withdrawn and losing weight, but others say that she was previously outgoing and gregarious. It sounds to me like she’s been deteriorating mentally over the past six months and finally became psychotic. (The standard excuse has already been proferred: her sister states that she “snapped.” Just like “random violence,” this behaviour seems to materialize out of nothing, like ball lightning on a clear day.) How the parents of the children could not have noticed this is the real question. I think you’re right that they were so entranced with their “perfect” life that conflicting evidence was just airbrushed out of the picture and ignored.

LA replies:

That’s so well stated that I want to repeat it:

[T]hey were so entranced with their “perfect” life that conflicting evidence was just airbrushed out of the picture and ignored.

Terry Morris writes:

I think the mother was, in her own way, out of touch with reality. I find it disturbing that the family didn’t see the signs everyone else was apparently seeing of the nanny’s mental illness. While I understand that a single photo doesn’t necessarily mean anything, if the above photo of the nanny is any indication of her general state of mind, I fail to see how the parents could possibly have missed it. They must have been walking around with blinders on every single moment of every single day.

Poor children. God rest their innocent souls.

Jessica K. writes:

When it comes to nannies and other kinds of help, there’s a pattern to be seen with whites across time and in all places. And not just in race-blind liberals.

It was often said of white South Africans that they’d rather be murdered in their beds than have to make them themselves. The siren song of inexpensive, Zulu labor outweighed the well-understood danger involved in bringing Africans into the home. White South Africans were well aware of just how savagely violent Zulus could be, but that never stopped them from putting their own children into the care of Africans, nor from hiring them as house help. Apartheid, just as segregation in the American South, was misunderstood in that whites lived cheek by jowl with blacks, far closer than liberal whites do anywhere today. If they’d wanted to, white South Africans could easily have isolated themselves in their own separate homeland and barred Africans from entering, let’s say by dividing South Africa into two equal pieces. That way, they would’ve given the Zulus their own land, but wouldn’t be ruled by them as they are now. However, that would be the end of cheap labor, meaning that average Afrikaners would have to clean their own houses (gasp!) and take care of their own children (faint!). And who would work the mines? Certainly not they. I suspect that such an Afrikaner state would’ve begun importing non-white immigrants roughly 24 hours after its founding.

The same mode of behavior can be seen in whites in the pre-1965 American South. They went to significant lengths to describe blacks as violent and impulsive, but seemingly not violent and impulsive enough to stop them leaving their children, their very own flesh and blood, in black hands.

The pattern is clear, and gives us a hint of our future. I cannot think of any society that has managed voluntarily to break the habit once they’ve experienced the intoxication of inexpensive labor. To Europeans and their descendants, cheap labor vastly outweighs self-preservation.

LA replies:

What you’ve said is connected with a passage from my booklet Huddled Clichés, which I also quoted at the beginning of this entry:

Throughout history, nations have inadvertently lost their independence by asking other nations to help them meet some challenge that they couldn’t handle themselves. Depending on the kindness of strangers may yield short-term benefits, but it further weakens the host nation. Sensing that weakness, the guests soon drop all pretense of being guests and take over.

Sometimes the help sought from foreigners has been military. The ancient Greeks asked the Romans, the Romans asked the Visigoths, the Celtic Britons asked the Anglo-Saxons, to help them ward off their respective enemies, and in each case the helpful ally soon became the ruler. Sometimes the help is economic. The Romans after they gained their empire imported a vast population of foreigners into Italy as artisans, merchants, servants, slaves, and soldiers, and as a result the old Romans and their culture were gradually marginalized. In the twentieth century Indians were brought to the island nation of Fiji to work as merchants and civil servants, and within a few decades the Indians had taken majority control of the island away from the Fijians. The American South imported African slaves, and today the descendants of those slaves are busy dismantling whatever remains of the symbols and traditions of their former masters. In each case the host people initially congratulates itself for its cleverness in getting foreigners to fight its enemies, perform its hard labor, care for its children, or provide it with exotic cuisine or inexpensive produce. And in each case the host people ends up losing control over its own country, and disappearing from the pages of history.

This is not to deny that immigrants who bring particular skills, or “cultural capital,” may be of great help in building up a society, as Thomas Sowell has demonstrated in his several books on the subject of ethnicity and economics. But as Sowell himself acknowledges, the large-scale immigration of people who are culturally distinct from the host population is a very different matter. Such immigration, he writes, “can profoundly affect the fabric of a society and even dissolve the ties that hold a nation together.”(14)

To recognize the dangers of immigration is not to propose sealing America off from the world. Nevertheless, if America, or any nation, is to survive in the long run, it must maintain a basic degree of self-sufficiency, foregoing the short-lived luxuries both of global hegemony and of mass immigration.

Karl D. writes:

I am one quarter Dominican—well, kind of. My maternal grandfather came to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic with his family in the early 1920s. They were however of Spanish blood and part of the Dominican ruling class. Their ancestors initially came to the New World at the behest of the Spanish Crown sometime in the 18th century, I believe.

My grandfather would tell me about the hired servants and about how no matter how long they were in your employ, you had to keep an eye on them, never get too personal, and ALWAYS let them know who was boss! Not in a cruel or malicious way. But almost like an officer would treat enlisted men. There was a clear division.

Marina Krim, and so many others who hire nannies or housekeepers, do the complete opposite. Their liberal upbringing and white guilt forces them to embrace the hired help, get personally involved with them, and essentially turn them into a member of the family. It is a terrible mistake for many reasons.

Ed H. writes:

Let’s add one more layer of manufactured wonderfulness to the Krims’ world. Mr. and Mrs. Krim both came from that bastion of critical self awareness, suburban Southern California. They lived in the white utopia of Manhattan Beach which is surrounded by places they themselves never went to, like Compton and South Los Angeles; then they moved to the island of Manhattan which is surrounded by places they never went to, like Yoselyn Ortega’s South Bronx. Once in New York City they recreated the same conditions of insular self-absorption to which they were accustomed and erected around themselves concentric circles of insulation and unreality.

Such fairy tale worlds cost money—in Manhattan they cost twice as much. We can assume that the Krims’ monthly expenses were in excess of $30,000. The rent on the apartment alone was $11,000 per month, then there was the shopping, the restaurants, the swim lessons, the private schools, the pediatricians, the shrinks, the taxi fares, the health clubs, the cars, the travel, and let’s not forget the layers of security needed to keep Third World NYC from so rudely breaking in. So where did all the money come from? Here is where we get to the outer shell of Liberal Unreality. Mr. Krim earned the money as Vice President of Digital Content for CNBC. That is, the Krims’ world was supported by the mass production and distribution of digitally enhanced forms of unreality consumed by other liberals bent on living in similar feel-good fantasy-worlds. Worlds that are daily becoming more penetrated by the poverty, madness, and desperation of Third World America which they did so much to establish.

Gintas writes:

It all sounds like what happens in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. You can “Insulate! Insulate! Insulate!” but one wrong turn and it all comes apart.

Kidist Paulos Asrat writes:

Wanda S. wrote:

Yoslyn Orgega doesn’t seem to fit the profile of a deracinated Third World immigrant who can’t cope with life in the affluent West. The story states that she lived at the same address in the Bronx for 30 years—she’s not a recent immigrant, she’s lived in New York most of her life. They make much of the fact that she lived in a “crowded tenement,” but the only photos I’ve seen … shows a perfectly ordinary apartment building, not rundown, rat-infested pile the loaded word “tenement” would suggest … [S]he has no criminal record, and has never been in trouble with the police.

- Living in the U.S. for 30 years doesn’t mean anything, especially with immigrants who never leave their enclaves, and who don’t integrate in any way, which is much more common with non-Western immigrants. “Deracinated” can be an appropriate term even for immigrants with 30-year residency.

- These days, landlords have to make a semblance of maintenance, or all types of housing commissions will descend on them. And even if the apartment looks reasonably nice, it will have all kinds of irritating deficiencies, from absentee superintendents, to leaking pipes taking weeks to fix. That way, the rent can be kept pretty low and affordable for low-income tenants. Also, many low-income tenants can get all kinds of government subsidies to help them with living costs, including rent subsidies. And smart landlords apply directly to get these kinds of tenants to fill their apartments which might not attract other, more discerning, tenants.

- A lack of criminal record doesn’t guarantee a lack of criminal (low level) activity, like forging welfare checks, and other social assistance benefits, for example. Also, I always get the impression that non-Western, low income immigrants live on the edge of criminality in so many ways, including, in many cases, with how they entered these countries in the first place. Immigration fraud, welfare fraud, and other social benefits frauds are very hard to prove.

- This lack of desire or ability to integrate builds a whole strata of people who cannot enter normal life activities, or who resent some kind of blockage they face to rising higher. I think resentment and envy become common.

Beth M. writes:

How much does a trained (Norland, etc.) nanny cost these days in Manhattan, and how much does the average Dominican nanny in Manhattan charge? So far, I haven’t seen anyone mention how much “Josie” was receiving from the Krims, and I haven’t yet heard whether Josie was legal or illegal. [LA replies: She is a naturalized U.S. citizen.]

I wonder how many upscale families are now re-thinking their childcare arrangements? I’m haunted by the photos of the children, and my heart breaks for the three-year-old who is too young to understand why her brother and sister are gone forever.

David P. writes:

The Krims had visited Ortega’s family in the Dominican Republic, and had actually stayed with them. This was a mistake as the Krims violated an understanding of sorts between very different segments of society—not getting too close with the help.

In the movie Sullivan’s Travels, the butler gives a bit of sage advice to his employer, a rich and successful movie director, who has the idea of travelling among the poorer segments of society to get ideas for a movie:

I doubt if they would appreciate it, sir. They rather resent the invasion of their privacy … I believe quite properly, sir. Also, such excursions can be extremely dangerous, sir … You see, sir, rich people and theorists, who are usually rich people, think of poverty in the negative, as the lack of riches, as disease might be called the lack of health, but it isn’t, sir. Poverty is not the lack of anything, but a positive plague, virulent in itself, contagious as cholera, with Filth, Criminality, Vice and Despair as only a few of its symptoms. It is to be stayed away from, even for purposes of study. It is to be shunned.

Mark A. writes:

This episode reminds me of the time I wanted some yard work done. The white guys down my street (they may even be unionized. Egads! The horror!) wanted $1,500 for the job. It’s a family business. These guys live in my neighborhood. I know them. Upon hearing the quote, my mother said, “But you can probably get some Mexicans to come in here and do this for $500!” After she said this, I told her, “Mom—I don’t need illegals from the Third World anywhere near my kids.” I gladly paid the extra $1,000 in cash. I stress that I paid an extra amount in cash. However, I believe that I bought myself an intangible worth far in excess of $1,000.

The Krims learned, the hard way, that there is no such thing as cheap labor.

October 28

Nick D. writes:

This is an admittedly insignificant footnote in the horrible murders of those two beautiful children, but it was odd that Mrs. Krim anglicized Yoselyn’s name to “Josie,” while espanicizing her son Leo’s name to “Lito.” “Josie” was not the only woman in this story to have a loose screw.

Unfortunately, almost no one will learn from this couples’ mistake, and continue to employ Third World domestic helpers. “Ours is one of the good ones,” they will insist.

LA replies:

Marina Krim didn’t just employ Yoselyn Ortega, she “bent over backward” to make her feel at home. In stereotypical liberal fashion, she was so fixated on her efforts to make “Josie” feel a part of the family and to “do enough” for Josie that it she wasn’t observing whether Josie was in fact the right person to be “in” her family.

Look at the photo of Ortega with two of the Krim children from the October 27 New York Daily News:

Nanny Yoselyn Ortega, pictured with Lucia Krim (right)
and surviving daughter Nessie, 3 (obscured).

Ortega looks strange. She does not look like a typical nanny. For one thing, she is too old. She is 50. Whoever heard of a 50 year old nanny? All the nannies I see in New York are young women. Second, her face is strange and strained-looking. She does not look like a wholesome or healthy person. Her color is sickly. (I was in the DR last spring, and many Dominicans are comely people, with an attractive bronze complexion.) There’s something disturbing and strained about the set of her mouth. Overall, her face makes me think of dark and negative forces, like voodoo or something. Her hand as it grips one of the children does not look like the hand of a healthy, young person. That very dark blood-red fingernail polish is inappropriate for a woman caring for small children.

She does not look like a “together” person who was hired through a reputable service. And in fact she was not hired though a service. She was simply recommended by another couple whom the Krims knew. The Krims, a very well-to-do family, brought this Third World woman into their home, to care for their children, without any professional screening of her at all.

I would not say (and I think it would be very unfair to say) that Lucia and Leo Krim were murdered simply because their parents hired a Third-World nanny. I think they were murdered because their parents hired a Third-World nanny without proper evaluation and observation of her, without sufficient discrimination.

I think that Marina Krim was so transported by the wonderfulness of her life that she was blinded to reality.

Think of her blog. She had lovely children. There was something very special about them (and, to my mind, especially Lucia, whose lit-up, smiling, slightly mischievous face haunts me with the thought of the girl she was and the adult she would have become). The joy Mrs. Krim took in her children at her blog is a delightful thing to behold. But was it appropriate to effuse about her fantastic children, about her personal happiness and fulfillment, on a public web page? Isn’t there something boastful in that, even a kind of hubris? And hubris comes before a fall.

But our culture today encourages such hubris. The breaking down of all boundaries between the public and the private, so that everything that normally would be private is now public, makes people prideful about their positive characteristics, and shameless about their negative characteristics. And this is connected in turn with the heedlessness, the blindness, that afflicts contemporary people. In today’s society people are so full of themselves, so drunk with themselves and their emotions—whether it’s females posting publicly (with photos) about their latest boyfriend on their Facebook page, or criminals boasting of their crimes on their Facebook page, which gets them immediately arrested, or people boasting on their Facebook page of some unseemly personal behavior (or perhaps making some politically incorrect statement which obviously should have been kept private) which gets them fired from their job—that they become blinded to reality, unable to make discriminations even in life-or-death matters.

Alexis Zarkov writes:

When my daughter was as young as the Krim children, we looked around for a baby sitter. I wouldn’t even trust a white American teenager let alone some freak from the Third World. Through some friends, we got a mature white woman in her mid to late 50s. My friends knew this lady for well over 20 years, and the friends were solid citizens themselves. One was a colleague at work. In my opinion, this is the level of care we should exercise with our very young children. I wouldn’t have trusted a person like Yoselyn to care for my cat. This Krim story makes me ill. What kind of world am I living in? In the white Anglo-Saxon world of the past, this sort of grim murder of the innocent would happen only a few times in a century. Today it seems like a regular occurrence. I cannot grasp why we want to risk inviting hordes from the Third World into our previously safe country. Even the most hardened white criminals like Dillinger would have never harmed a child. The notorious Willie Sutton robbed banks with unloaded guns because he was afraid he might hurt someone. Bank patrons would remark how polite and gentle was he. This is the difference between white and non-white crime. This is the reality that we cannot face as a country. I fear all this will end very badly for our country as it might take a civil war to set things straight.

Allan Wall writes:

I was interested in Karl D.’s comment about the relationship between white Dominicans and their hired help. It reminded me of Mexico, where I resided for a decade and a half. It’s amazing how white Latin Americans can retain control over large swaths of territory in which they are minorities. And this habit of control seems to be so deeply ingrained in the culture that some don’t even consciously notice it. Hypocritically, white Latin Americans are among the biggest critics of U.S. immigration policy!

James N. writes:

I have been a daily reader of VFR for seven years. I have learned many things.

My emotions about this crime have prevented me from thinking of anything incisive or intelligent to say.

However, I want to praise your comment published today:

But our culture today encourages such hubris. The breaking down of all boundaries between the public and the private, so that everything that normally would be private is now public, makes people prideful about their positive characteristics, and shameless about their negative characteristics. And this is connected in turn with the heedlessness, the blindness, that afflicts contemporary people. In today’s society people are so full of themselves, so drunk with themselves and their emotions—whether it’s females posting publicly (with photos) about their latest boyfriend on their Facebook page, or criminals boasting of their crimes on their Facebook page, which gets them immediately arrested, or people boasting on their Facebook page of some unseemly personal behavior (or perhaps making some politically incorrect statement which obviously should have been kept private) which gets them fired from their job—that they become blinded to reality, unable to make discriminations even in life-or-death matters.

This is the most brilliant comment of yours that I think I have ever read, the more so because it is not about liberals and “conservatives”, nor is it about Islam, nor immigration, nor high and low culture—it just cuts to the bone like a knife as it dissects how we are today.

LA replies:

Thank you very much. Your praise means a lot to me.

Matthew H. writes:

You write:

The joy Mrs. Krim took in her children at her blog is a delightful thing to behold. But was it appropriate to effuse about her fantastic children, about her personal happiness and fulfillment, on a public web page? Isn’t there something boastful in that, even a kind of hubris? And hubris comes before a fall.

This poor woman, like so many other women of her generation, was brain-washed into over-exposing her whole life. I have seen this “No Fear” parenting mentality before. It is invariably accompanied by the shrill political correctness which is the pre-condition for admittance to today’s haute bourgeoisie. It seems that people at this level are forced by the rigid ideology of their class to go completely overboard in status-driven displays of their virtuous obliviousness.

I make two predictions:

1. Somewhere an ethno-marxist academic will write a PhD dissertation lauding the killer for striking a blow at the heart of white privilege.

2. The Krims will found a charity in their children’s names (or maybe in the nanny’s name) devoted to bringing whiteness and enlightenment to poor Third-Worlders. In modern etiquette this is the only proper response.

William writes:

The circumstance of the horrible murders of the children by the nanny reminds me of another occurence that was commented on here not so long ago. It was the near death injury to the New York socialite inflicted by some savage kids throwing a shopping cart from a building above, with the cart landing on her head. Like the murdered kids’ mother, she was a well-to-do white woman trying to help others less accomplished in life. Like the mother, she appeared to be either naive or oblivious to the dangerous situation into which she was placing herself. Like the mother, she was harmed by the very people she was trying to help. If I my memory is correct, during her recovery, she said that she forgave the kids who did it.

LA replies:

Yes, that was Marion Hedges. Here is the initial news report, and here are other VFR articles about that.

However, other than that the perps were nonwhite and the victim was a white do-gooder helping nonwhites, the cases are not similar. Marion Hedges was not hurt directly by people she was helping, but by members of the same class she was helping, namely “underprivileged” youth in East Harlem. Also, I don’t think that they were deliberately trying to hurt her or aiming the shopping cart at her. In an act of pure savagery, they threw the shopping cart off the high level walkway onto the mall four stories below where Marion Hedges, acompanied by her son, was buying Halloween sweets for Harlem trick-or-treaters.

Clark Coleman writes:

Mrs. Krim did not work outside the home. Why did they need a nanny in the first place?

LA replies:

That’s been explained in media articles and by me.

Earlier in this entry, the NYT reports:

Though Ms. Krim did not work outside the home, Mr. Krim’s parents said, they wanted a nanny to help out. Sometimes, Ms. Krim would take the two oldest children out with her, leaving the youngest with Ms. Ortega, whom they called Josie.

I have to say that the almost punitive attitude some readers exhibit toward Mrs. Krim merely for the fact of having a nanny / baby sitter help her with her children (leaving aside the question of the quality of that nanny) strikes me as wrongheaded and unfair.

James N. writes:

You said: “I have to say that the almost punitive attitude some readers exhibit toward Mrs. Krim merely for the fact of having a nanny / baby sitter help her with her children (leaving aside the question of the quality of that nanny) strikes me as wrongheaded and unfair.”

Of course I agree. But it’s also true that where you stand depends on where you sit, or something.

You recently defended feeling alienated, to the point of being unable to feel empathy, for a man with antisocial tattoos who had lost his child. In that comment, you made the point that certain actions have the effect of separating one from the community, or at least from one’s fellows who are repelled by such grotesque displays.

There are many people who make great sacrifices to allow children (often more than three) to be raised by their mother and father. For some of those people, a non-working mother needing a nanny to manage only three children is a travesty, a manifestation (I suppose) of a value system that devalues their own.

Don’t mistake me. I have not criticized Mrs. Krim, and even if I had experienced a negative thought about her in this regard, that thought was my own and does not belong to the world.

The system of anonymous Internet commentary such as we often see appended to newspaper articles brings out the worst in some people.

LA replies:

I think that criticisms of her merely for hiring a nanny is unfair because it implies that she handed over the raising of her children to a stranger. I don’t think it was that way. I think the nanny was there to help fill in the gaps.

This reminds me of my own family. My mother did not work outside the home, and we never had a nanny (or whatever that would have been called in those days). But, as with many middle class suburban families in the 1950s, my mother had a colored maid come in around three days a week who helped out with cooking, cleaning, and also being in the house to look after me when I got home from school if my mother was out. She was a very nice young woman named Dorothy. She worked for us for some years and was like part of the family. (This was not when I was a toddler, but after the age of five or six—I was by six years the youngest of three children.) Was my mother violating a moral principle by hiring extra help which allowed her occasionally to pursue activities outside the home? Was the fact that my parents were financially able to hire a maid who helped with cooking and cleaning a travesty of the values of families who weren’t and didn’t?

LA continues:

I should add that Dorothy’s husband, Bill (or as she pronounced it, Beel), got into trouble with the law when he killed a man in a fight and my father helped them with the legal costs. He went to jail for a few years.

November 2

Ian M. writes:

I just read this post.

My hasty and inchoate thoughts that were prompted by it:

I think that people’s drunken celebration of themselves blinding them to reality is connected to people being blinded to reality by sex. I would say that the latter is a (particularly potent) subset of the former. What is a young man’s promiscuity but a drunken celebration of his own virility and masculinity? He gets drunk on the pleasures of sex and with his success in bedding women (which he may boast about publicly) and becomes completely self-absorbed by it. This self-absorption leads to spiritual pride, which naturally leads to blindness to anything that transcends the individual’s own self and his desires.

I think this is also connected to the “vitalist” stage of nihilism that you’ve written about.

LA replies:

I note that Ian had spoken in conversation about people his age who are “blinded to reality by sexual indulgence,” and I had asked him to expand on that for VFR, which he did in the entry “Sex and Reality.” Before he submitted it, I used his phrase “blinded to reality” in this entry, in reference to people who are drunken with themselves, their emotions, and the wonderfulness of their lives.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 27, 2012 09:48 AM | Send