The Case of the IRT Five

...By the rules of his society, was Darrel Cabey mad to go after an apparently easy mark...

...So the wallet and watch are handed over on demand, and the normal citizen is left feeling grateful that he wasn't killed, albeit humiliated and very angry...

...The IRT five deserve society's thanks, along with some punishment, for forcing everyone's attention onto the insane conditions that city dwellers of every race endure: An essential system of mass transportation has become a symbol of all that is most frightening about urban existence...

...Although, alas, there is still truth in any charge of racism in this country, the word has lost much of its meaning and power...

...The projects built to house the poor under wholesome conditions have become places where sane people fear to ride the elevators and children are contaminated...

...she fears to send the children into the streets wearing anything that might provoke envy, lest they return without it...

...You don't have to be a psychoanalyst to deduce that the shooting came out of something much more tangled than a commitment to civic order...

...Is it racist to notice that a lot of the crime on the New York City subways is committed by young black men...

...Was Goetz' reluctance to relive those feelings a symptom of a crackup...

...The Fears of Mrs...

...It is like a poor old drayhorse that has been beaten to its knees...

...Yet whatever the reasons for the antisocial behavior, a subway rider need hardly be racist to feel threatened by the approach of a group of young blacks...

...The question of whether the punishment Goetz inflicted was proportionate to the offense he suffered is likely to be of more interest to philosophers of the law than to his peers...

...Cabey lives in a proj ect in the South Bronx and fears to let her children's friends into her apartment lest they spot something attractive enough to steal...

...Since it is my fate to be periodically called but never chosen to serve, I had plenty of time to read the ruminations, exhortations and proclamations of newspaper and magazine columnists inspired by the case of the white man who shot four young black men on New York City's Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) line...

...Those who make this diagnosis do not mean that the four blacks were racist in putting the arm on a white man, but that the public support for Goetz is generated by racial animosity against blacks...

...Unexceptionable...

...The grand jury's decision to indict Goetz only for violating the gun licensing laws is evidently in accord with the feelings of most of the nation, but the man does not come through as a reassuring model for the gun fanciers who have rallied to him...

...Did he go too far when he fired, and fired again, reportedly into the backs of two of the men...

...The fellow was primed...

...She said that she knew Darrel was running with bad company —but, then, she worked all day, and who is there for a teenager to run with in the South Bronx...

...He comes across as a lonely man, with perhaps too much time to tend his anger and fear at having been mugged before...

...To mix my metaphors, it has become a main line of defense against any criticism of black leaders or their programs and a comfort blanket to protect ideological preferences from the chill blasts of reality...

...Goetz' lawyer has told the press that his client is worried about all the young people who cannot find jobs...

...From the Left, we learn that the affair is yet another demonstration of the racism endemic to our society...

...Prudence suggests feeling equally threatened by a group of young whites who ask you for five dollars—and if you happen to shoot them, no one will charge you with violating their civil rights...

...But anybody who believes this shooting will put the fear of Goetz into the city's aspiring criminals is an optimist...

...The columnists embraced the case: It offered an opportunity to scale the heights of indignation or plumb the depths of compassion, and to score points off insufficiently compassionate or indignant competitors...

...Should he have fired a demonstration bullet at one of the other passengers, like dropping the bomb on Nagasaki...

...Would it have been saner to allow himself to be mugged again...

...all were, as they say, in trouble with the law...

...Maybe they are misunderstood...

...One columnist was so carried away by the theme of racism and vigilan-tism that he conjured up the prospect of the nation taking Goetz as a model and inflicting "tribal justice" on blacks and Hispanics...

...Racism and Reality The difficulty in assessing any charge of racism today is that the word has been so overworked...

...Maybe if Goetz had declined their request for five dollars, they would have walked mildly away...

...Certainly when Goetz drew his gun against the four after they accosted him, that counts as self-defense...

...The liberal center calls for a better policed transit system...

...Yet another generation is growing up that has so little to lose and so little to give to society that crime is their sanest outlet...

...The Fear of Goetz The eagerness of Right-wingers to champion Goetz recalls that scene out of Victor Hugo where the poor hunchback is loaded with honors by the mob, which somehow worships him even as it mocks and fears him...

...Behind that grim reality is a long and terrible history, leading to the self-destructive desperation that seems to drive many ghetto youths...

...It diverts attention from a set of facts that do not present blacks as manifest victims...

...What is the wonder that he should have found support around the country...

...The profoundly crazy aspect of this whole situation is that everybody was behaving rationally, since, after all, sanity is in the mind of one's society...

...Was it self-defense...

...Mrs...

...Everything one reads about Goetz is depressing...

...His alleged assailants no doubt think so...

...If he had been carrying a gun, his children would probably have been better off...

...The predators of New York's subways and streets thrive on the rationality of those who do not resist...

...Cabey Still, just as one is hardening one's heart against these youths, satisfied that they got what they were asking for, one comes across a newspaper interview with the mother of Darrel Cabey, the now paralyzed 19-year-old...

...They cite nasty epithets from anonymous letters...

...Cabey and her six children, including Darrel, who was out on bail on a holdup charge when he had the bad judgment to pick on Goetz, are victims of crime to a degree far beyond the middle-class citizen who is mugged or whose house is burgled...

...Cabey told of her husband, a taxi driver, who was killed trying to keep his cab from being stolen...

...If there were a watchdog agency for the protection of words, "racism" would have been granted protective custody or honorable retirement some time ago...

...This was not the first time these four had been out on the prowl...

...Goetz arouses the sympathy that comes with singularity...

...His adversaries, even the one who lies paralyzed from the bullet, tend to merge with all those youths (what a wholesome word) who seem to have nothing much to do besides going around afflicting respectable people...

...it's never worth it, unless you happen to be carrying a gun...

...But these aspects of our insanity lie beyond the province of a jury...

...As for diagnosing the public support of Goetz as racist, that explains less than it evades...

...Over at the New York Post, Goetz instantly became an objectfor baiting liberals, much as "racism" became the weapon of choice on the Left...

...It might as readily serve as a dare to young men for whom a risk-free life is not much of a life at all...

...Unfortunately, this particular subject invites reflections that are obvious when they are not far-fetched, and there have been plenty of both sorts circulating in recent weeks...

...Such is the hysteria of ideology...

...Was Bernhard Goetz mad to pull the trigger...