Editorials / Stopping the Violence / At Dawn to Cast His Flies
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
C onnoisseurs of the national follies await the requisite outcry against the brutal and gratuitous murder of Michael Jordan's father. Then too, we await the outcry against the claim that Deputy...
...Hard-working and law-abiding men and women bore them, while they remain smitten by the perverse and the violent...
...The progressives who still dominate our culture continue to doubt the efficacy of punishment and the justice of retribution...
...Foster don rubber gloves before writing the note...
...Or did someone wipe the scraps clean...
...Then too, we await the outcry against the claim that Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster, before committing suicide, tore his suicide note into thirty or so pieces without leaving any fingerprints...
...After all, as the Washington Post editorializes from the Fantasyland it inhabits, "Michael Jordan is probably the most famous man on Earth...
...This, of course, means more courts and more prisons...
...Instead, from Official Washington there is silence...
...The alleged murderers of James Jordan should still have been in jail on July 23 if newspaper accounts of their lives are accurate...
...One had spent two years in jail for slamming a fellow youth over the head with anax...
...What happened...
...And what about the murder of James Jordan...
...The victim will be disabled for years, probably forever...
...Finally, it is about time that the intellectual and moral authorities of our society properly abominate criminals and come to the defense of society...
...Foster oversaw certain questionable financial dealings on • behalf of the Clintons...
...Denounce violence, whether it is found in the street, in pop music, or in sports...
...It now turns out that, while resting by a roadside in rural North Carolina, he was shot by two hooligans with a dozen or so unprocessed crimes between them...
...Moreover, there are so many guns in the country that the authorities will not even be able to collect them...
...Our courts are already overwhelmed with cases, many of which are frivolous, the frivolous being heaved in with the serious...
...The other brute had committed similarly ruthless acts and multitudes of other petty crimes...
...Naturally their reflexive response to this murder is the humbuggery of "gun control...
...Yet they were free in the early hours of July 23 to murder a man who was merely doing what all adults are advised to do when becoming weary behind the wheel, to wit, pull over and nap...
...Well, they urge that Michael Jordan, the victim's son, enter upon a personal campaign of pontification against violence, appearing in classrooms and on television ads...
...Perhaps this is an inadvertent admission of what vacuums our intellectual authorities have become...
...And what of the palm print we now hear was found on the paper...
...And if so, why...
...The redoubtable William Safire tells us that Mr...
...Speedy prosecution of violent offenders followed by severe sentencing is required...
...Should there not, now, be the full investigation into the Foster death that some of us have been calling for...
...And what is the response from our pundits...
...Is it possible that the nation's pundits and keepers of the national conscience are going to accept that the note found in Vincent Foster's attaché case had no fingerprints on it...
...For decades, the writers, scholars, and general eggheads of the progressive miasma have been absorbed with the so-called rights of criminals, the hypocrisy of society, the fascinating human interest stories of common thugs...
...Advocate manners and law-abidingness...
...It might even mean that judges give short shrift to the frivolous lawsuits that fill our courts and that laws be passed to dissuade litigants from bringing their personal problems into the courtroom...
...The brief lives of both can be duly characterized as crime sprees...
...Actually, the country has a pretty good idea how to relieve the present wave of violence...
...Nor will a society that cannot lock away the kinds of savages that allegedly murdered James Jordan punish gun owners or even indict them...
...There, more critical matters are pressing...
...Of course, the solution to the violence that spreads ever wider throughout our society is not gun control...
...Did Mr...
...Deride the fanciful violence that suffuses our entertainments...
...In other words, it is time our progressive intellectuals break with their time-honored rhapsody on a theme of perversity...
...A society that cannot interdict so many other species of contraband will not interdict guns...
Vol. 26 • October 1993 • No. 10
