Piecework

More important, victimism has one overriding slogan, the response to almost all questions about the source of their misery and victimhood: It’s not my fault! Dropped out of high school? Not my fault. Started shooting heroin or smoking crack when others passed up both? Not my fault. Married the wrong people, got caught robbing stores, crashed the car with a load on? Not me, man, not my fault. Victimism implies that nobody is personally responsible for the living of a life. The defeats, disappointments, and failures that were once thought to be part of each human being’s portion on this earth are not only unacceptable now, considered soul-killing, career-bruising, life-threatening, but they are always the fault of somebody else.

I’ve heard the endless complaint on all levels of society. In a ghetto, I see a woman point to a hole in the bathroom wall and demand to know why the landlord won’t fix it. Well, I ask, how’d it get there? It just appeared, she says. Why doesn’t she fix it herself? What? What? Are you crazy? It’s not my fault! This could be explained as the heritage of fifty years of welfare. But I hear the echo out in East Hampton on a summer afternoon, where one of those captains of industry is complaining about the Japanese. We shouldn’t even let their cars in here! Why not? Because the Japanese are unfair. In what way? He mumbles about rice, cigarettes, other items not easily admitted to Japan, and how the Japanese won’t let Americans into the construction business, and how they insist on writing their documents in Japanese, the crafty buggers. I say, What does all that have to do with car sales? The captain of industry glowers: Well, he says, what would you do about our car sales? Make better cars, I suggest. He looks at me, eyes widening. What? Don’t you understand? The Japanese are giving us the shaft! We are falling behind, but hey, fella, get on the team! It’s not our fault!

On the silliest level, victimism disguises itself with the sophomoric rigidities of political correctness. Surely, the demand for PC is one of the more comical developments in American life. We have people eating out of garbage cans while humorless brigades of ignorant kids are combing language, literature, and the corner bar for evidence of expression that will offend, hurt, or enrage somebody. They warp, bend, fold, spindle, and otherwise mutilate words that they find offensive, and in the process throw out all notions of freedom of speech. The slogan of these incipient Stalinists seems to be: I’m offended, therefore I am.

But the sad comedy of victimism usually plays on a wider stage, and in some cases the scripts are straight out of the theater of the absurd. The drug raid on three University of Virginia fraternity houses was partly in response to complaints that the local cops only went after drug dealers and users in the black part of town. In Los Angeles, one accused drug dealer is claiming that his arrest in a sweep of dealers working near public schools was a “separate and unequal” prosecution, targeting minorities. Both charges are loony; imagine the outcry if the police stopped policing minority neighborhoods, leaving the crack dealer to operate under the commandments of laissez-faire capitalism. Victimism insists that the police can never be decent; if they do the job, they are hurting and offending people; if they refuse to do the job, they are contributing to genocide. God bless America; it’s a laugh a minute around here.

But there is a darker, more dangerous aspect to victimism. It can be used as a license. Bernhard Goetz was a statue in the park of Victimist theory. So are all the other nerds who shoot first. All they need is the perception of being victims. In the past few years, we have seen a number of cases in which battered wives have burned, shot, or stabbed their husbands and then been acquitted on the grounds that they were the victims. I have no doubt that many of these women were abused by the idiots they married. Was murder really the only solution? At what point does the claim to victimhood serve as a license to kill?