This Is Not News

Aside from being able to perform tasks pantsless, the best thing about working at home is that you don’t have to drive anywhere. I hate driving. If it weren’t for the amount of time I spend on the road, I would very likely be one of those sedate Pete Seeger-type bearded individuals who always seem to keep bees or grow their own hemp or something. Instead, because my job requires a certain amount of driving, I am slightly more tense than, say, a Serengeti wildlife proctologist.

My friends say I am impatient. They are clearly fools. It’s not me; it’s the other guy. Duh.

Part of this, of course, is because I live in central Pennsylvania, where drivers seem to be taught that the brake pedal is somehow a useful tool. This is idiocy at its worst. The brake pedal is to be used only in extreme emergency situations, such as sighting a police cruiser or parking.

I learned to drive in Philadelphia, where the roads are teeming with people who hate you and want to kill you and then maybe drive back and forth over your body a couple of times. There, I developed the idea that tailgating was a mean, awful, horrible thing that only smokers and fugitives from justice did. Tailgating, for those of you who don’t know, is the practice of driving as close as possible to the rear bumper of the car in front of you, in hopes that the person driving will either speed up or get really upset and maybe spill his Dunkin Donuts Coffee Coolata into his lap.

In central Pennsylvania, I have learned that tailgating is a useful motivational tool and should be frequently used, unless there are police officers around. I was once stopped for tailgating by a Pennsylvania state police trooper who was either very nice or very stupid.

“Do you know why I pulled you over?” he asked. Cops always ask this, and I wonder if anyone ever says something like “Because of all those old people I swindled?” or “Because I slept with your wife?”

“Ummm… I guess I was kinda tailgating that car in front of me,” I said. Men don’t have the ability to cry their way out of tickets like women do, so we have to act sheepish, thereby affirming the officer’s role as the alpha male, and perhaps appealing to his sense of machismo.

“Yes you were,” said the officer, clearly secure in his masculinity. I should have made a pass at him. “Do you know the rule for following the car in front of you?”

Rule? Sure I knew the rule. It had something to do with estimating the number of car lengths between you, and multiplying by ten, and getting your speed in miles per hour, and I was pretty sure Avigadro’s Number figured in there somewhere. I related this much to the cop, and we dickered over what the hell Avigadro did to deserve his own number, since neither of us had our own number, and we work hard to put food on the table, at least as hard as Avigadro did, who probably never lifted a finger in his life except to pick up a piece of chalk, which we were pretty sure they didn’t even have in ancient Greece, and there you are.

Actually, he just told me I was wrong. Apparently that used to be the right formula, but people stopped paying attention to the road so they could find the discrete numbers settings on their scientific calculators, and some people got in accidents, so they changed it.

Now it’s something called the “two-second rule,” which means that you give the jackass in front of you exactly two seconds to put his foot on the freaking gas pedal before you ram him from behind.

Kidding again. It means that you pick an object by the side of the road, like a mailbox or an Amish person, and start counting after the car in front of you passes it. If you get to two by the time your car passes the object, you’re not tailgating.

So get this: The cop let me off the hook, because – and this is, like, totally what he said – I knew what I was doing wrong. Seriously.

I don’t know about you, but when I see cops out there setting scofflaws free because they have a pretty good understanding of the crime code they violated, I go around the house locking the doors and maybe start thinking about vigilante justice and whether I could get one of those grappling hook guns like Batman has. Imagine if the whole criminal justice system worked like that.

JUDGE: It says here you strangled six preschool teachers with their own intestines while their students watched in horror.

SERIAL KILLER: Oh yeah. Boy was that illegal. Total violation of this state’s murder statute. Wow.

JUDGE: You did the right thing by telling me. The court clerk will give you a lollipop on your way out.

I’m not complaining. I didn’t get a ticket, and I get to keep tailgating stupid drivers, safe in the knowledge that our state’s criminal justice system will let self-aware criminals like myself off the hook.

But I’m still miserable. People drive so slowly. And they lean on their brakes. And they slow the car to one mile an hour before making a turn. And they sit at four-way stop signs for minutes on end, where I assume they wring their hands and wonder what to do.

On the up side, I have developed what is perhaps the most extensive lexicon of lewd imperative phraseology. I never fail to impress myself when attempting to come up with a suitable suggestion as to what a particular driver should do with his grandmother, or his dog, or a pair of incontinent oxen.

This will likely result in numerous job offers someday.

We’ve got to do something about these people that are afraid that federal hate crime legislation will somehow curb everyone’s rights.

One of the biggest proponents of this idea is syndicated columnist Charley Reese, a Pat Buchanan cheerleader who writes a weekly column for King Features Syndicate. Reese has done a pretty good job of encapsulating all of the arguments I’ve heard on the topic, so I’ll bounce my ideas off his.

Let’s define our terms first. Read a copy of the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 1999, proposed in the Senate, then come back.

Reese claims that hate crime legislation dictates that “if someone hits you on the head because of your religion or sexual orientation, then you are a more important victim than your neighbor who gets whacked on the head just so somebody can steal his wallet.”

He’s wrong. If someone attacks you because of your religion or sexual orientation, you are not a more important victim than someone who has been mugged, and there is no legislation – proposed or otherwise – that ranks crime victims in order of importance.

But while a hate crime victim may not be a more important victim, he is the victim of a more important crime. A mugging is more or less random. Sure, you’re more likely to get knocked over if you’re wearing Donna Karan than those Regis Philbin “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” tone-on-tone clothes, but whether you’re gay or Christian or whatever doesn’t generally figure into a mugger’s decision.

Hate crimes, however, are extremely important crimes because they serve as a message to a group of people: Watch it, this might happen to you. I’m certainly not about to tell a mother whose son was killed by a drunk driver that his death was any less important than, say, Matthew Shepherd’s, but the circumstances behind Shepherd’s death represent a problem at least as great as driving under the influence. If we can prosecute a person with more aplomb because they did what they did while intoxicated, we can certainly go after someone with equal aplomb who committed a similar (yet probably more intentional) crime while fully sober.

But, say Reese and his ilk, what’s wrong with sending a message? Isn’t that protected by the First Amendment? Reese claims that hate crime legislation is the first step toward hate speech legislation, and that supporters of hate crime legislation are simply bleeding-heart liberals who want cops to push their politically correct agendas onto the populace.

Really. I’m not exaggerating, except for use of the term “bleeding-heart liberals.” And the notion that prosecuting someone slightly more vigorously for committing a crime based on racism or homophobia will somehow circumvent the first amendment is absurd. If you want to exercise your freedom of speech, put the damn tire iron down and write a letter to the editor like everyone else.

Hate crime legislation seeks to prosecute a wrong, not perpetuate it. That’s precisely why much of it is worded broadly – to include crimes committed against anyone, even white Christian men.

In Pennsylvania, we have something called the “ethnic intimidation” law. Basically, it addresses crimes aimed at someone because of their race or religion (sexual orientation has yet to be included on the list). It raises the degree of a crime by one – second degree murder, under the ethnic intimidation statute, becomes murder one. Other felonies and misdemeanors follow suit. It’s basically a sentencing guideline.

These guidelines have come into play in the sentencing of 39-year-old Ronald Taylor, a black man who marched through a Pittsburgh suburb last March, shooting white people and raving about white-on-black racism. The whole thing terrified all of western Pennsylvania, especially Pittsburgh, where even the local morning deejays were trying to figure out how this sort of thing is still happening.

“I’m not going to hurt any black people,” Taylor allegedly said to a neighbor.

The Southern Poverty Law Center reported this in Intelligence Report, its quarterly magazine. Generally, the SPLC reports hate crimes across the country as news briefs, choosing to centerpiece less regional phenomena. The lead in the SPLC brief was “This time, the gunman was black,” which admittedly displays the situation as an unusual one.

That’s because it is, at least according to the FBI’s most recent statistics. Of 9,235 hate crimes committed in 1998, just over 4,000 were committed by whites – more than the number of offenses where the perpetrator’s race was unknown. Blacks came in second, committing 958 such crimes in 1998.

The majority of victims of hate crimes in ’98 were black, totaling 3,663. Jews were second, with 1,235 victims. Coming in third were gay men, at 1,005. Whites fell just under that, accounting for 1,003 victims in 1998.

Those who would seek to deny a federal hate crimes law seem to think such a law would be used to victimize white Christian men, and that a crime against a white man will be judged by lesser standards than a crime against a black man. For now, we won’t point out the death row statistics recently compiled by the Justice Department, pointing to the fact that minorities might not get as fair a shake as us white folks. For now, let’s address that idea for what it is: Just Plain Silly.

First off, not every crime involving differently pigmented attackers and victims is necessarily a hate crime. If a gay Latino beats up a Promise Keeper, he may be the perpetrator of a hate crime – and then again, he may not. Just as if that same Promise Keeper beat up that same gay Latino, it might or might not be a hate crime. It all depends on what the investigators of the crime determine to be the reason behind it.

Again: Every crime is not a hate crime, and only a percentage of crimes – probably a small one – has even the potential to be a hate crime. Knocking someone over the head because you want his wallet is quite different from knocking him over the head because he’s different from you.

Inevitably, this will screw up, as every policy is wont to do on a long enough timeline. Inevitably, someone will be charged with a hate crime even if it wasn’t, or vice versa. Nobody said the justice system is perfect, least of all Janet Reno.

And if any of us white men are scared that the wheels of justice will start rolling over our shoes, just look at the facts. Like Reno’s report said, you won’t find many of us on death row. We’re generally not the ones screwed over by poorly picked juries and lackluster defense attorneys and poverty and public sentiment. Believe me, gentlemen. We have nothing to worry about.

And what if that were true? What if, somehow, the paradigm shifted, and federal hate crime laws were aimed unfairly at heterosexual white men? What if we woke up one day and the courts were controlled by bleeding-heart liberals who excoriated whites and lionized blacks?

Maybe getting a taste of our own medicine wouldn’t be such a bad idea.