This Is Not News

OK, so you’ve heard the one about the guy who gets called for jury duty a week before his vacation and has to put off all the classes he’s teaching. At least, I hope you have. If not, you seriously need to go back and read it. Dave wrote it last month. Or maybe the month before. Probably the month before. But go read it, because it’s pretty good. Better than this story, anyway.

But they’re both about crime, which is the topic of today’s Humor column. Because crime can affect YOU, mister smarty pants. Yeah, you. With the Doritos. Put ’em down and listen.

This is a story about how crime can strike anyone, at any time, even in the middle of a major metropolitan area with a high crime rate at 3 a.m on a deserted street with no cops around. It’s the story about how one time I went out for ice cream and lost TWO DOLLARS to a roving gang of armed bandits. It’s the story of a boy and a horse, and their love for one another. And it’s all true, except for the part about the horse, which I just made up right now.

It was the summer of 1993. Bill Clinton was firmly entrenched in the White House and a young rapper named MC Hammer was well on his way to abject poverty. I understand he’s some sort of minister now. So it just goes to show the curveballs life can throw you sometimes.

I had just graduated from high school and had my entire life ahead of me. Well, except for the part that had already occurred, which was actually behind me, if you want to get technical. I was at home with my friend Dennis, who had come to spend the night at my house because my mother had gone somewhere for the weekend and didn’t want me getting into trouble.

Remember that: My mother didn’t want me getting into trouble. And Vanity Fair says irony is dead.

So after a long night of playing fantasy role-playing games and watching premium-channel soft porn (Remember: High school! I’m actually very cool now! And quite successful with the ladies!), Dennis and I decided that some ice cream would hit the spot. So we struck out for a local convenience store, not really thinking that it was 3 a.m. and the muggers clocked in at about midnight. Hours of fantasy RPG and The Red Shoe Diaries will do that to you.

I bought one of those ice cream sandwiches where it’s actually two chocolate chip cookies with ice cream in between them. Dennis bought the latest LSD-inspired flavor from Ben and Jerry. Shine on, you crazy diamond!

So we left the convenience store. That’s when I asked Dennis if he wanted to hit the local Dunkin’ Donuts on the way home. Now, pay close attention:

Get ready for this: Dennis didn’t want to go to Dunkin’ Donuts because he wanted to save his money. And Vanity Fair says irony is dead.

So we walked in the direction of the muggers. Only at the time we didn’t actually know there were muggers there, of course. That would have been stupid.

Eventually, we crossed paths with them: Three guys walking on the same side of the street, toward us, making eye contact. We didn’t think anything about it until they stopped us.

Let’s pause here, because this is the part of the story where nearly every white person I have ever met asks the same question. “Were they black guys?” they ask. Or sometimes: “They were black guys, right?” Occasionally, even: “I assume they were black guys.”

So: Yes. They were black guys, okay? Black as the freaking ace of spades. They were considerably blacker than the white prep school boys that, for absolutely no reason, tormented me on the school bus for three years. And much blacker than the white guy who threatened to kill my mother when he held up the convenience store she worked in when I was little. Now kindly insert your head back into your rectum.

Anyway.

They stopped us, and their leader explained that they didn’t want any trouble.

“We don’t want any trouble,” he said. “And we’re real sorry to have to do this. But we’re gonna have to ask you to give us all your money.”

That’s when the guy closest to me took out the gun and pointed it at my stomach. It was a cool gun, actually, one of those guns where you cock it by pulling back on the thing that goes over the part behind the barrel. I wanted to ask him about it, maybe have him show it to me and explain how it worked, but I figured he was busy mugging me and I didn’t want to bother him while he was at work.

Like I said, there were three guys: The Gun Guy, who was next to me, who was likely chosen via some sort of Coolest Afro/Sunglasses combination contest; the Leader, who was likely chosen because he was well-spoken and also very tall; and the Lookout, who was probably chosen because he was the guy who’s all nervous and says stuff like “Guys? I got a bad feeling about this. Guys?”

The Gun Guy took care of me. Leader and Lookout shook Dennis down. Fortunately, I only had two dollars on me, since I had spent the better part of a five-dollar bill on ice cream and some other junk I can’t remember. Dennis had about $50 on him, which Leader and Lookout were more than happy to relieve him of. They took his ice cream, too. They didn’t take mine, probably because it was half-eaten.

There was this one part where the Gun Guy was patting down my pockets and found my house keys. When he asked what they were, I showed him and told him he couldn’t have them because I needed them to get back into my house. He said okay.

In retrospect, this was very stupid. I mean, he had a gun, you know?

So they finished mugging us and we all came back together to close the deal.

“Okay,” said Leader. “Thanks for your time. Sorry to have bothered you.”

He seriously said this.

“Hey,” I responded. “Anytime.”

And we parted ways. Or at least, we tried to. It turned out we were all going in the same direction.

“Look,” said Leader. “You can’t follow us.”

“Well, we’re going this way too,” I said.

“But you can’t follow us.” He was pretty clear on this point. We’re pretty sure the Gun Guy was in his camp too, which made any subsequent discussion purely academic.

“Okay, how about this,” I said. “We’ll hang out here for a few minutes while you guys get going. Then after we’ve given you a sufficient head start, we’ll get on our way.”

Leader thought about this.

“Okay,” he said.

They turned around and walked away. They looked in the plastic bag they stole from Dennis to see what kind of ice cream they got.

So we went home. I was a little shaken up, and so was Dennis. We didn’t call the police, mostly because we forgot.

All in all, it was a pretty good experience, and well worth two dollars for such a cool story. It impresses people, anyway, and I get to feel all intrepid when I check “yes” on surveys that ask if I’ve ever been the victim of a violent crime.

But I guess we failed in our primary goal, which was to get ice cream. I mean, I still had my ice cream after the mugging, but Dennis grabbed it from me and threw it in the gutter when I started gloating about it. So we went out to get ice cream, and came back with none.

And Vanity Fair says irony is dead.

Some heroes don’t wear uniforms. Sometimes, staying up late is all it takes.

In all the mess, it’s easy to forget the people who worked hard to get it right the first time.

**********

By 10 p.m. on Election Eve in the courthouse at Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania, polling officials from each of the county’s 53 voting districts had returned stacks of ballots.

About 100 people – election judges, courthouse employees, reporters and assorted stragglers – had gathered in the building’s main lobby. Some munched on complimentary snacks, others smoked cigarettes. The din of conversation was deafening.

They were wondering why they couldn’t go home.

* * * * * * * *

The room that usually serves as a weekly meeting place for Huntingdon County’s commissioners had been transformed into Election Central, where about a dozen county workers and commissioners rushed around like ants whose home had just been poked with a stick by a giant fourth grader.

The machine – the machine that was to tabulate the ballots cast by all of Huntingdon County’s 45,000 voters in the 2000 election – had broken down.

On folding tables and folding chairs and the floor and on every piece of furniture in the room, thousands of ballots were stacked, uncounted.

Usually, they were better than halfway done by this time.

Sandra McNeal and Eydie Miller were the two women in the room not to mess with. Serving as county elections clerk and chief clerk respectively, the two were pushing buttons frantically on the machine, trying to figure out the problem. In trial runs, it had worked fine. In years past, it had worked fine. But now, less than two hours before midnight, it was on the fritz.

It was swallowing ballots two or three at a time, and gumming up its own works. McNeal and Miller could count a few votes in five minutes, then they would have to reach into the machine’s innards and pull out a handful of ballots and start over again.

They kept trying. Meanwhile, the county’s three commissioners had gathered in the lobby to talk to reporters, knowing full well that word of the breakdown would get out eventually. Soon, they would have about 60 to 70 very impatient election judges on their hands. Damage control was a top priority.

“It’s looking like we’ll be ordering McDonald’s for breakfast,” said Alexa Cook, Republican chair of the county commission. Usually poised and camera-ready, hours of not sitting down had left Cook looking sleepy-eyed. Her colleagues, Republican Kent East and Democrat Roy Thomas, had loosened their ties.

“Oh yeah,” said East. “We’re gonna see the sun come up.”

* * * * * * * *

In a best-case scenario, everyone figured, the votes would be counted by 2 a.m. A best-case scenario would involve the machine miraculously starting to operate properly, and the ballots being run through in record time.

It was still jamming.

The device was a monster, a beige behemoth covered in blinking Star Trek lights. Attached to its top was a dot-matrix printer which spat out the results of the count; on the bottom was a space to stack ballots that the machine would pull through its mechanisms. There is nary a chad to be found in Huntingdon, where voters fill in ovals with a pencil, SAT-style. The machine reads the dark marks much like ScanTron devices read standardized tests.

Gathered in Election Central were numerous county employees: Grant administrators, planners, a lawyer, a recycling coordinator, even an intern. Most sat in chairs, offering jokes and moral support to McNeal and Miller, who took turns listening to elevator music over the phone. Tech support for the tabulating machine was on the other end of the line, trying to figure out what the problem was.

East had his sleeves rolled up to the elbow and had shoved his arm into the machine, probing to see what was jamming it. From time to time, he would peer at it displays, as if probing it psychically.

“I can see the headline now: Commissioner Works on Machine,” joked the county’s recycling director. “Get the camera.” East grinned.

After more than an hour and a half of no progress, it was all they could do. For now, tech support was the key. All they could do was wait for the hold music to stop.

“I just hate not doing anything,” said a county planner. “I just want to be busy.”

* * * * * * * *

Meanwhile, in the lobby, the mood was darkening. The fruit tray was empty, and the pumpkin bread was nearly gone. Three lonely broccoli florets were all that was left of the crudite.

Most of those present were poll workers from the county’s dozens of municipalities. Before they could go home, they had to get certified results from the county officials, and nobody had come out of the office in a while. Some of the poll workers had kids with them. Most others were elderly.

Miller decided to do what she’d most feared she’d have to do: Tell them to go home without the certified results. That meant someone would have to travel to each voting precinct in the county the next day, delivering the results so they could be posted.

Driving straight without stopping, it takes a speedy driver about an hour and fifteen minutes to get from one end of Huntingdon County to the other.

At 10:30, a cheer went up in the lobby as people gathered up their coats and their kids.

In the basement of the courthouse, the phone was ringing. Reporters from Huntingdon’s daily newspaper have a deal with Miller and McNeal: They get the election results before anyone else, provided they man the courthouse phones all night. Most calls that come in are from local television affiliates and radio stations, and newspapers too far away to send their own reporters.

Locals watching television that night saw only 30 percent of Huntingdon County precincts reporting by 11:30.

* * * * * * * *

McNeal was on her shift listening to hold music. All the red lights were blinking on the machine.

“Can we all pray?” asked Miller.

Soon after that, she made her next announcement: Anyone else that wanted to go home could do so. She and McNeal could handle whatever came up, with the help of maybe one other person, most likely a commissioner. Everyone else that wanted to could leave. Nobody had the next day off, after all.

Nobody moved. The intern, who was from a local college and had a midterm at 8 a.m. the next morning, eventually went home. But nobody else moved.

Meanwhile, tech support had taken McNeal off hold and was telling her what to do.

* * * * * * * *

Miller was using rubbing alcohol to swab something in the machine called a “retard pad.” It was all the advice tech support could give.

Nobody was saying anything.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s try it again.”

McNeal fed it a fistful of ballots, and flipped the switch.

The second cheer of the evening went up. This one was weaker, wearier, and not as loud as the first, but no less mighty.

The machine went clackity-clackity-clackity as it counted ballots. But after about 100, it jammed again.

That was good enough, they decided. To try any harder to fix it would jeopardize getting it done at all. As it went longer, people would get sleepy-eyed, and possibly less accurate. The trick now was to get the ballots counted as quickly as possible.

By 3 a.m., they were done. Every vote had been tabulated.

Despite East’s prediction, nobody saw the sun come up.

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.