2018-02-23 18:58:03 +00:00
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---
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created_at: '2018-01-21T19:36:02.000Z'
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title: The Joys of Victimhood (1989)
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url: http://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/02/magazine/the-joys-of-victimhood.html?pagewanted=2&pagewanted=all
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author: imartin2k
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points: 93
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story_text:
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comment_text:
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num_comments: 68
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story_id:
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story_title:
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story_url:
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parent_id:
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created_at_i: 1516563362
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_tags:
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- story
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- author_imartin2k
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- story_16199541
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objectID: '16199541'
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2018-06-08 12:05:27 +00:00
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year: 1989
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2018-02-23 18:58:03 +00:00
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---
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2018-03-03 09:35:28 +00:00
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A SHAME THERE ISN'T A MA-chine, the sociological equivalent of a
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seismograph, that registers fundamental shifts in social attitudes and
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concerns. In the absence of such a machine, we all have to operate with
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our own often rather primitive social radar, taking our signals where we
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find them. When one's dentist, for example, begins to say ''pasta''
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instead of spaghetti or noodles, one knows that the interest in cookery
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has fully swept the middle classes. When one sees Mafia men jogging and
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worrying about their cholesterol, one knows that anxiety about health
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really is endemic. What began as a fad becomes a trend, which becomes a
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shift, which finally becomes a serious change in the way we live and
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think about ourselves.
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My own fairly low-voltage radar has been pinging away for some while on
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another such shift, and last summer, while I was watching the Democratic
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National Convention on television, it began to bleep furiously in my
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mind. The noise could no longer be avoided when, at the moment that Ann
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Richards, the Texas State Treasurer, completed her strong keynote
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speech, the commentator on the television network I was watching
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remarked (as near as I can recall), ''Ann Richards is a divorced mother
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of four who has undergone rehabilitation for an alcohol problem.''
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Earlier in the campaign, Kitty Dukakis had announced that she had
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undergone treatment for an addiction she had to diet pills. During his
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speech at the convention, Jesse Jackson, in speaking of his own origins,
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declared that he was an illegitimate child, and then he wove a speech
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around the metaphor of the Democratic Party being a quilt both made by
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and supplying warmth to all those elements in American life - minority
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groups, homosexuals, American Indians (or Native Americans, as they're
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now known), welfare families, and many others - who, in Mr. Jackson's
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reading, were America's victims. Eight and even four years earlier, the
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Democratic Party had advertised itself as the party of concern. Last
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summer, though, the Democratic Party seemed to have cut out the
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middleman and gone from ''caring persons'' straight to victims. The
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logic of the convention seemed to call for Michael Dukakis, on the night
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of his nomination, to arrive in an iron lung and announce that he was a
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lesbian mother.
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Victims have never been in short supply in the world, but the rush to
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identify oneself as a victim is rather a new feature of modern life. Why
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this should be so isn't very complicated: to position oneself as a
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victim is to position oneself for sympathy, special treatment, even
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victory. It's not only individuals who benefit. In international
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politics, one sees the deliberate strategy of positioning for victimhood
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played out in the Middle East. Although Israel is a country of fewer
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than four million Jewish people surrounded by Arab nations numbering
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some 200 million people, very few of whom mean the Israelis well, the
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Arabs have somehow been able to make themselves - or at least the
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Palestinians as their representatives - seem the great victims in the
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Middle East. Every time a woman or a small child is injured in the
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organized riots known as the intifada - one might ask why small children
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are allowed anywhere near such danger - the victimhood of the
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Palestinians is reinforced and their cause, as victims, made all the
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stronger.
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Gandhi was the great teacher of the art of victimhood, of setting one's
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victimization on full public display. Part of the genius of the Rev. Dr.
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Martin Luther King Jr. was to recognize the value of Gandhi's lessons
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for the American civil rights movement, and most especially the lesson
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of nonviolent resistance, which not only highlights victimhood but gives
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it, in a good cause, a genuinely moral aura. Their moral and physical
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courage lent civil rights workers in the South an appeal that was
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irresistible to all but the most hard-hearted of segregationists.
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Americans, all of whose families began in this country as immigrants,
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have a built-in tradition of having known victimhood, at least
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historically, and hence a strong tendency toward sympathy for victims.
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Yet it was the civil rights movement, by my reckoning, that changed the
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tenor, the quality, the very nature of victimhood in the United States.
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I happened to be living in the South in the early 1960's, working as a
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director of the antipoverty program in Little Rock, Ark., while the
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civil rights movement was under way in full earnest. What I saw was a
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number of bad laws called into question and ultimately removed by acts
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of courage and wise restraint on the part of the victims of those laws.
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One really had to have nailed shut the shutters to one's heart not to
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have been moved by the spectacle of men and women risking everything to
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gain only what in fairness was coming to them. It was immensely
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impressive, on every level. Why? Because the early civil rights
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movement's appeal was unmistakably not to the guilt but to the
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conscience of the nation.
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An appeal to conscience is an appeal to one's ethical nature, to one's
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sense of fair play; it is fundamentally an appeal to act upon the best
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that is in one. An appeal to guilt is almost entirely negative; rather
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than awaken the best in one, it reminds one what a dog one is.
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Conscience seeks its outlet in action, or right conduct; guilt seeks
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assuagement, or to find a way to be let off the hook.
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The civil rights movement, like a spiritual oil spill, left a vast
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residue of guilt in its wake. Suddenly, if you were white you couldn't
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possibly be in the right. Such civil rights figures as Stokely
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Carmichael and H. Rap Brown - and not they alone -were endlessly
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reminding everyone that their forebears were brought to this country
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against their will in chains by our forebears. (That my forebears
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themselves fled a 25-year conscription in the czar's army and your
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forebears fled the peril of another potato famine was judged beside the
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point.) This abundant stirring up of guilt may have produced little in
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the way of direct social change, but it did without doubt strike its
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target - so profoundly that social scientists began to write about a
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''culture of guilt.'' The guilt that was loosed, moreover, was of a kind
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that had no outlet. What are you supposed to do, after all, if someone
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blames you for slavery, a hideous institution, to be sure, but one
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defunct for more than a century? Say you are sorry it ever happened?
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Should you clear your throat and announce that there are historical
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reasons for some of these things?
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And yet if you couldn't fight 'em, you could, spiritually at any rate,
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attempt to join 'em. The most efficient way to do so was not to deny the
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claims of militant blacks but instead set out claims of your own to
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victimhood alongside theirs. One saw this happen straightaway with the
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student protest movement of the late 1960's and early 1970's. Many
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students of those days not only claimed victimhood but claimed it
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precisely on the black model. Students were powerless, they said, they
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were exploited. Powerless, exploited, thoroughly alienated. Those were
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the claims of one group after another - 60's students, feminists,
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homosexuals, Vietnam veterans, the handicapped, even artists. Yea,
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verily, they would all overcome, except over whom? Who was left to be
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overcome? It soon began to seem as if there wasn't anyone in American
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life who couldn't find grounds for claiming to be a victim.
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Small wonder, too, for victimhood has not only its privileges but its
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pleasures. To begin with, it allows one to save one's greatest sympathy
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for that most sympathetic of characters -oneself. Of the various kinds
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and degrees of pity, easily the most vigilant is self-pity. To stake out
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one's own territory as a victim, or member of a victim group, also
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allows one to cut the moral ground out from under others who make an
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appeal on the basis of their victimhood - to go off singing, as it were,
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''You've got your troubles, I've got mine.''
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THE PLEASURES OF VICTIM-hood include imbuing one's life with a sense of
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drama. The drama of daily life is greatly heightened if one feels that
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society is organized against one.
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To feel oneself excluded and set apart is no longer obviously or even
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necessarily a bad thing. A victim cannot properly be thought bourgeois
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or middle-class in any significant way, which in some circles is itself
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meritorious. Excluded, set apart, alienated, the victim begins to sound
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like no one so much as the modern artist.
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Artists have for some while now liked to think of themselves as victims.
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Whole books - usually overwrought, rather boring books - have been
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written about the alienation of the artist in modern society. The bill
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of complaint states that the artist is undervalued, underappreciated -
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like the soft drink Dr Pepper in an old television commercial, so
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misunderstood. Best-selling novelists are driven in limousines to give
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lectures whose main message is that the artist in America has no place
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to rest his head. Painters with serious real estate holdings rant
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against a vile and philistine coun-try. Artists meanwhile maintain
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permanent victim status, which, it is understood, no public recognition
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or financial success can ever hope to diminish.
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Like other victim groups, artists can be exceedingly touchy. I once sat
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in a room where grants in the arts were being discussed, and I had the
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temerity to wonder aloud about the usefulness of a series of grants to
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support places where writers might meet to discuss their own and one
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another's work. Did writers truly need such institutions, I asked, being
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in the trade some years myself and never having felt the need of them.
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In response, a rather famous novelist replied with a lengthy exegesis on
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the loneliness of the writer who spends months, often years on the same
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project, filled with doubt, encouraged by no one, stirred only by the
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passion to create something that no one may eventually want. . . . Did
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she, I wondered (this time to myself), show slides with that talk? It
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reminded me of H. L. Mencken's remark that whenever he heard writers
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complain about the loneliness of their work he recommended that they
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spend a few days on the assembly line, where they would have plenty of
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opportunities for camaraderie with their mates.
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Sometimes it must be difficult for the spokesmen for victims to keep up
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the anger - Jesse Jackson in an expensive suit, Gloria Steinem at a
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socialite party at the New York Public Library - but, whether simulated
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or real, the note of outrage always seems to be there when they need it.
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A victim, especially a professional victim, must at all times be angry,
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suspicious, above all progress-denying. He or she is ever on the lookout
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for that touch of racism, sexism, or homophobia that might show up in a
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stray opinion, an odd locution, an uninformed misnomer. With victims
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everywhere, life becomes a minefield in a cow pasture - no matter where
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you step, you are in trouble.
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As if all this isn't nervous-making enough, there has come into being a
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large number of people, many of them in universities, who, if not
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victims themselves, wish to speak for victims or rouse other people to a
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sense of their injury as victims. They are the intellectual equivalent
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of ambulance chasers.
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Perhaps the best place to see the traffic of victims and ambulance
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chasers in full flow is in the contemporary university. I don't think
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it's stretching things to say that nowadays if you cannot declare victim
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status, or find some way to align yourself with putative victims, in the
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contemporary university you don't figure to have much standing.
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Victimisme, to Frenchify the condition, is very much where the action is
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in universities. Women's centers, African-American studies programs,
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student gay and lesbian programs, and those ultimate intellectual
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ambulance chasers, academic Marxists, all hammer cheerfully away at
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revealing what a perfect hell life has been, and continues to be, for
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almost everyone in the world. And yet they all seem so happy in their
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work: the young man wearing a smile and a black T-shirt with the pink
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triangle that Hitler forced homosexuals under the Nazis to wear; the
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young female professor and her graduate student sharing an intimate
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scornful laugh at the hopeless sexist assumptions of an older male
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professor; the recently tenured Marxist theorist in the black leather
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jacket and Bertolt Brecht haircut. Happy victims all.
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One might conceivably be a victim if one works in a coal mine or a steel
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mill or in the fields as a sharecropper, but no one who works as a
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teacher in a university, or for that matter is a student there, is a
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victim. To have a teaching job in a university is to work roughly seven
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months a year in a generally Edenic setting at intellectual tasks
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largely of one's own choosing. Relativity of relativities, a victim
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among university teachers is someone who isn't permitted to teach the
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Shakespeare course, or who feels he has stupid students, or whose office
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is drafty, or who doesn't get tenure (which is lifetime security in the
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job) and therefore must find another job within (usually) the next 16
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months. These are not exactly the kinds of problem faced by, say, boat
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people fleeing Cambodia.
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Yet an increasing number of university teachers nowadays teach one or
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another branch of victimology -what might not unfairly be called Victim
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Lit. The more prestige-laden the school, the more victimological studies
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are likely to be a strong component in its curriculum.
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''Unfortunately,'' writes a black Harvard graduate named Christopher H.
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Foreman Jr. in a letter to The New Republic about ethnic sensitivity
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training at Harvard, ''the psychological comfort of being simultaneously
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privileged and oppressed seems too enticing for many people to forgo.''
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Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and other only scarcely less august
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institutions compete among themselves lest they be caught without a
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goodly supply of angry teachers of victimological subjects. Irony of
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ironies, nuttiness of nuttinesses, the scene thus presented is that of
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the fortunate teaching the privileged that the world is by and large
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divided between the oppressed and the oppressors, victims and
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executioners, and that the former are inevitably morally superior. As a
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tuition-paying parent, I used sometimes to think, writing out those
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heavy checks to universities, that the only true victims in this entire
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arrangement were those of us who helped to pay for it all.
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Such a situation could never have come about without certain fundamental
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confusions having been firmly established, and these begin with language
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itself. Victims have traditionally been minority groups, but in fact
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women, who in the United States are a slight majority, have been deemed
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victims, whereas the Jews and the Chinese in America, though clearly
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minorities (and vastly less numerous than blacks or Hispanic people),
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are not usually counted as victims and thus rarely get included in
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affirmative action or other quota favoritism programs. A victim, then,
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is someone who insistently declares himself a victim.
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People who count and call themselves victims never blame themselves for
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their condition. They therefore have to find enemies. Forces high and
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low block their progress: society is organized against them; history is
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not on their side; the malevolent, who are always in ample supply,
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conspire to keep them down. Asked by an interviewer in Time magazine
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about violence in schools that are all-black -that is, violence by
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blacks against blacks - the novelist Toni Morrison replies, ''None of
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those things can take place, you know, without the complicity of the
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people who run the schools and the city.''
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For victimhood to be taken seriously, there has to be a core of
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substance to the victim's complaints. Blacks were discriminated against,
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de facto and de jure, in this country for a very long while. Women were
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paid lower wages for doing the same work as men and they were
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indubitably excluded from jobs they were perfectly capable of
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performing. Mexican-Americans often worked under deplorable conditions.
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A case for victimhood cannot simply be invented, though some people try.
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I recall some time ago watching a television program that stressed the
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problems of the unwed teen-age father. Greatly gripping though they
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doubtless were, I remember muttering to myself: the unwed father,
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another victim group - who'd've thunk it?
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Even when there is a core of substance to the victims' complaints, they
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tend to push it. A subtle shift takes place, and suddenly the victim is
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no longer making appeals but demands. The terms lady and homosexual are
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out; it's only woman and gay that are acceptable. Public pronouncements
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from victims take on a slightly menacing quality, in which, somehow, the
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line between victim and bully seems to blur. At some point, one gets the
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sense that the victims actively enjoy their victimhood - enjoy the moral
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vantage point it gives them to tell off the rest of the country, to
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overstate their case, to absolve themselves from all responsibility for
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their condition, to ask the impossible and then demonstrate outrage when
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it isn't delivered.
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Apparently, the victims of our day rather like this state of affairs. I
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say ''apparently'' because it has been many years since any of the
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victim groups have shown anything approaching a genuine interest in
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organization. Instead, they seem to function chiefly as loose
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repositories for the expression of resentment. A strong sign of this is
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the striking absence of leadership in any of the major victim movements
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of the time: black, women, gay. The Rainbow Coalition - it might more
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accurately be called the Victim Coalition - isn't cutting it. Like the
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wild rookie pitcher in the movie ''Bull Durham,'' the various victim
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groups are ''all over the place'': blaming racism for black teen-age
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crime, male psychology for capitalism, the Government for AIDS. There is
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something fundamentally unserious about all of this. Whereas once the
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idea was to shake off victimhood through courage and organization,
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nowadays the idea seems to be to enjoy it for its emotional effects.
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Not many other people seem to be enjoying it, though. The reserves of
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guilt that victims once felt they could draw on now appear all but
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depleted. White ethnics and others have begun to feel themselves the
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victims of affirmative action and other favoritism programs, so that we
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have the phenomenon of victims created by victims. Those whom the
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victims have been attacking all these years are themselves beginning to
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feel like victims. It's a real growth industry. When I recently read, in
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The Times Literary Supplement of London, at the close of a review of two
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books on adultery, that ''Adultery is built upon, even aimed at, female
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unhappiness,'' I wondered if the T.L.S. would one day soon carry an
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angry answering letter from a man representing a society of cuckolds.
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Just the other day I heard a fresh euphemism for what used to be known
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as ''the handicapped.'' Take a moment to breathe in deeply before I set
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it out on the page, for I think it might take your breath away. The
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handicapped, in this new euphemism, are ''the physically challenged.''
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Somebody, obviously, has been working overtime.
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Yet I cannot help think of the contempt in which that euphemism is
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likely to be held by the people I know who are seriously handicapped.
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These people do not in the least think themselves physically challenged;
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instead, they know that they have to undergo endless small and
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infuriating difficulties that the rest of us have been spared. They have
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been kicked, very hard, in the stomach by fate. Without denying or
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attempting to disguise the effects of this devastating kick, they
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neither whine about it nor protest it.
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As it happens, these people are all intensely political (they are
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liberals and conservatives), but the last thing I can imagine any of
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them doing is using his handicap for political advantage or for that
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matter in any public way either to define or advance himself. Because
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they neither act as nor think of themselves as victims, in the end they
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seem, far from victimized, immensely dignified and quietly heroic.
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Although it was never their intention to do so, they make the
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contemporary joys of victimhood -the assumption of moral superiority,
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the spread of guilt and bad feeling, the shifting of responsibility for
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one's own destiny onto others or the ''system'' or society at large -
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seem rather dreary, if not pathetic. They also remind the rest of us
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that the most efficient way to become truly a victim is to think and act
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like a victim.
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drawing
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