Now I ask you: The poor Mexican’s death is a tragedy, but when was the last time teenagers got drunk after a football match and got into a fight without hurling ethnic insults? Even worse is the fact that the two were railroaded in a trial that amounted to double jeopardy—being tried twice for the same crime. The state found them guilty of manslaughter, and the government was dissatisfied with the verdict. Hispanic groups are cheering and bringing down the rafters. No columnist or TV personality has dared point out this case’s outrageousness.

Covertly recording one’s gay roommate as he is having sex and sharing the video with everyone is so typical of America today. Kids watch TV programs which use trash talk and violence demanded by marketing strategists. Vulgar, drug-fueled, crotch-centric garbage is the norm. Dirty jokes, incivility, and mean-spirited putdowns are the new funny. Good old Britain is not far behind. Just look at that awful Brand fellow, the one who telephoned a grandfather and left him a message he had slept with his granddaughter. This same pig is now selling a story how he slept with the divine Kate Moss. “A gent of the old school,” as my father used to say in such cases.

So there you have it. There is a growing sense of entitlement and of dependency by the so-called minorities, one egged on by the government, whereas on the part of the white population there is resentment and distrust. Too many white folk, as the idiotic George W. Bush called them, think that everyone’s on the fiddle except for themselves. There is an election coming up and the media is obsessed with such folk, the Tea Partiers. Congress is a forum for legalized bribes, and lawmakers are putting what they see as social justice before liberty. A commentator recently wrote that Americans may seem happy and successful on the outside “but are leading lives of quiet desperation.” He was quoting John Cheever, I believe, who wrote about small-town dwellers and suburbia. I do not agree with Cheever. His life was certainly a desperate one, as he fought his acute alcoholism and closet homosexuality most of his adult life. (Not that closeted, mind you, as Cheever openly fell in love with men, had affairs with them, told everybody including his own family about them, then pronounced himself 100 percent heterosexual.) I’ve always found the suburbs to be great, gray flannel suits and all that, white picket fences and sports galore. It is Washington that’s rotten to the core, and the so-called elite in the media and the academy who rail against the so-called Tea Partiers and young men such as the two Polish-American youths whose lives are destroyed forever. People in middle America are not as spiritually stunted as The New York Times makes them out to be. They do watch very bad television for far too long, but even that’s better than reading that old hag and her slanted and stunted opinions. Time for radical change.