88 Beacons of Enlightenment

Perhaps, dear reader, you have heard of the Duke lacrosse rape scandal. If not, we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” have the sneaking suspicion that you were born either yesterday or today. Actually, make that definitely today: If you were born yesterday you should have heard about it by now.

Given the great media attention paid to the case, you are likely aware of the infamous so-called Group of 88. These much maligned Duke professors put forth a shoddy advertisement presuming the guilt of the three Duke lacrosse players, and encouraging the deeply intellectual protesters at Duke to continue their deeply intellectual protests by waving deeply intellectual flyers reading “Castrate.”

Well, there’s mud on their 88 faces. As it turns out, the Evil Rich White Males on the Duke lacrosse team didn’t commit a rape. Go figure. Apparently, DNA evidence (read: Rich white male science) was amongst the manifold things that exonerated the boys. How awful: Some radical professors have a point to make about the evils of Amerika, and a little thing like innocence gets in the way.

Accordingly, our charming Group of 88, who can usually be found nattering on about the horror of presuming the guilt of Gitmo detainees, blithely presumed the guilt of their own students. This is the sort of thing that Alannis Morissette, if she were a bit brighter, would label ironic.

In the Group of 88’s defense, however, we need to point out that the lacrosse players are Rich White Males, and therefore evil and immediately suspect. Q.E.D. So perhaps you can forgive our delightful faculty members for getting the nooses ready. We mean, come on: Osama bin Laden deserves the presumption of innocence, but we ought not extend it to Reade Seligmann.

From our vantage point, dear reader, we are having a hard time determining who looks worse in the Duke non-rape scandal aftermath. The witless and mean-spirited Nancy Grace; the unhinged Mau-Mau artist Houston Baker Jr.; the pusillanimous and devious Dick Brodhead; the slimy and incoherent Grant Farred; the obnoxious and smarmy William Chafe—my God, when was the last time you saw such an impressive lineup of exquisitely guilty folks? Nuremberg?

And we haven’t even mentioned Mike Nifong yet. Nor, we might add, the false accuser, whose name we won’t mention in order to protect her identity, but which rhymes with “Dystal Gail Mangum.”

To make matters even more delicious, The Chronicle, Duke University’s student newspaper, has offered sundry opportunities to the Gang of 88 to engage in self-satisfying hand-wringing. Accordingly, our tenured professors have presented the general reading public with an impressive congeries of completely unsatisfying arguments.

Our advertisement didn’t presume guilt, they say. Oh, sure: These are folks almost pathologically attuned to perceived grievances against various minority groups, and yet they can’t tell when they’ve blatantly wronged Rich White Males. If we weren’t so sure that this was a bald-faced lie that the Group of 88 obviously doesn’t believe, we’d be upset. But, frankly, dear reader, we can only laugh at such fatuity.

And now, as The Chronicle recently reported, the 88 Delightful Pedants can’t stop waxing horrific about the horrible treatment they received at the hands of Al Gore’s minions—i.e., the “webloggers.” Oh, dear Lord: It’s getting to the point where one can no longer unfairly malign defendants in court cases by presuming their guilt and not catch a little flak.

Is this where are country is heading? If so, we might just head over to Cuba—a country whose current government many in the Group of 88 presumably esteems.