Liberal Street Fighter

Thank goodness the wait is over! The suspense was killing me … was the distaff little hottie from down south going to get a chance at redemption? Would Donald “I’ll spend other people’s money on incredibly ugly buildings” Trump do the good Christian American thing and give Tara Connor a second chance to keep her meaningless crown?

“I’ve always been a believer in second chances,” Trump, who owns the Miss Universe Organization with NBC, said with Conner at his side. Trump said he and Conner had met earlier Tuesday morning.

“She left a small town in Kentucky and she was telling me that she got caught up in the whirlwind of New York,” Trump said at a news conference. “It’s a story that has happened many times before to many women and many men who came to the Big Apple. They wanted their slice of the Big Apple and they found out it wasn’t so easy.”

Conner won the title in April and has been living in New York. Recent media accounts of heavy drinking brought a storm of criticism since she was underage at the time. She turned 21 on Monday.

In a tear-choked voice, Conner said, “In no way did I think it would be possible for a second chance to be given to me.”

Turning to Trump, she said, “You’ll never know what this means to me, and I swear I will not let you down.”

Trump said Conner would be entering rehab. A pageant official said details would be worked out privately with Conner over the next weeks.

“I think Tara is going to be the great comeback kid,” Trump said.

The American dream is reaffirmed! Poor dear, seduced by all of those wanton faggy secular humanists in the big, bad city. After all, why else would she have sunk to engaging in hot teen-on-teen action out in the clubs? That would NEVER have happened if she’d stayed home in her “small town”! Damn you New York, seducing yet another GOOD girl with your demon rum and wanton public orgies!

THIS is the most important story being covered on what passes for our media now … well, except for the mountain climbers/popsicles lost somewhere on Mount Hood. We are a deeply hypocritical and maladjusted culture, and stories like these are used to sell us the continued lie that we are an exceptionally “GOOD” people, full of forgiveness and selfless charity to those in need.

We like to say that we’re a land that believes in second chances, that if someone is sincere about changing their life we Americans will support and welcome them when they’ve picked themselves up, and we’ll do everything we can to help them. This is, of course, utter bullshit. You get second chances if you’re of the right class, the right race, the right connections. Otherwise the full weight of our government and rapacious tabloid media will be brought down on your head:

Like the bankruptcy bill or these “shaming sentences” this is part of the zero tolerance culture that we see emerging in the courts and elsewhere, where we have ritual public humiliations designed to “send a message” and where people can never escape the mistakes of their youths. This allows the powerful and the sanctimonious to indulge in the fiction that they are morally superior by forcing others to pay both publicly and forever. A zero tolerance society turns into a paranoid society very quickly.

If that picture just above had been taken at certain clubs in Brooklyn, Queens or parts of Los Angeles, and if a darker pretty girl in it had been tested positive for drugs, she’d be far more likely to be facing charges than a stay at a celebrity rehab center. Our enormous prison system is bulging with people who did the same things that Miss Perfect American is reported to have done. Unlike her, many who get caught doing drugs or acting out in public are put into the system, and once in the odds of them getting a second chance disappear:

The collateral consequences for people with criminal convictions are already severe. One misdemeanor can significantly diminish or outright ruin your chances for various types of employment, housing, financial aid, higher education, and licensing (not to mention its potential immigration consequences). These collateral effects of criminal convictions — most severe for people being released from prison — disproportionately harm the poor, creating a miserable cycle that makes it even more difficult for people in economically and educationally depressed communities to better their circumstances.

To make matters even worse, the FBI now wants to go beyond tracking “severe and/or significant offenses” (felonies and significant misdemeanors) and include on criminal history reports (accessed by employers and licensing agencies) “non-serious offenses” – from drinking in public to teenage vagrancy, traffic violations to urinating in public, loitering to disorderly conduct. As Michelle Chen observes in the New Standard, this “would foreclose employment opportunities for an untold number of people, disproportionately impact people of color, and invite the abuse of sensitive information.”

The majority of employers will not hire someone with an arrest or “infraction” history, and even the most meaningless of follies will cause heightened scrutiny of the applicant. Any negative information, no matter how minor or long ago, will inevitably be prejudicial towards the applicant. Compound the stigma of even a non-criminal record with the fact that numerous state and federal laws have made it increasingly easy for employers to perform invasive background checks, and soon people’s lives could be negatively impacted by the revelation of even the most minor indiscretions.

Tara Connor is just a pretty package around a big lie, the myth we nurture that America is the land of rebirths, a country inhabited by phoenixes rising from the ashes of their mishaps and mistakes, that we are a people nurtured in a culture that makes it possible to make of your life whatever you want to make of it. A small number of people gifted with health, beauty, wealth and connections DO get to have those chances, but many of us are one tumor, one broken bone, one bag of weed or drunken drive or company downsizing away from the immolation of all of our dreams. While Ms. Connor gets the best help that money can buy, we allow children to starve and go without healthcare. We allow cities to drown, repeating urban fables about looting and phantom monsters shooting at rescue helicopters on the one hand, while we spend days and large sums of money and manpower searching for three men who CHOSE to place themselves in danger.

Tear-stained blondes and helicopters hovering over snowy peaks serve to gloss over how unforgiving and hateful we have become toward one another. I have nothing against Ms. Connor, or the thrill-seekers in Washington, but the lack of proportion given to their stories while so many suffer without hope or opportunity is a sign of a deeply broken culture.