The logic of whining

Victor Davis Hanson notes that the cult of the whining victim is now ubiquitous. He gives examples of black athletes making $9 million dollars a year saying the NFL, which is made up of 67% African American players, is racist; Oprah's handbag racism, Jorge Ramos making $75 million dollars a year saying that US citizens are ethnically insensitive toward Latinos who come to America illegally.

In the logic of whining, Michael Brown did not commit a felony or two in the last minutes of his life, from strong-armed robbery to assaulting a police officer, but was instead begging for his life with “hands up” and shouting “don’t shoot.” There is less cause and effect anymore, only someone who must be excused from responsibility and culpability by his own claims on victimhood.

...We also live in the most affluent and leisured era in the history of Western civilization. But given human nature, our bounty has not given us pause for appreciation, but rather increased our appetites in geometric fashion. The more we have, the more we think we deserve — or else. In an affluent society, society can afford now to have no losers. There is enough stuff and praise to be shared by all. In T-ball everyone is a winner; so is today’s student who feels A’s are his birthright. The poor man in the inner city has more computing power in his palm with an Apple smartphone than did the billionaire twenty years ago in his study — but, of course, not as versatile a phone perhaps as that of today’s billionaire, and thus he can legitimately whine that life is not fair due to the machinations of someone else.

On the other end of the social scale is the whining of the established elite, who bitch that the public has forgotten that they must be exempt to cross-examination and therefore must remind us of that by perpetual whining. The Obama administration mastered this natural trait of privileged scapegoating. For the first six years of Obama’s administration, all supposed achievement was Obama’s; every confirmed failure was the legacy of Emmanuel Goldstein, aka ex-President George W. Bush.

So monotonously expressed was Obama’s whine that we came to believe that Iraq was tumultuous rather than quiet and at peace when he came to office [5], that the September 2008 financial crash was exploding on the day of his inauguration rather than four months old [6], contained and addressed, that racial relations were improving rather serving up Fergusons and Baltimores, and that the Middle East and Russia were rather stable rather than imploding from Syria and Yemen to the Crimea and Ukraine. Obama never set a deadline with Syria, much less ignored it. The UN alone did that, not he.

Obama’s doppelganger is Hillary Clinton. Poor Mrs. Clinton. She was misled about her server, or did not want a handful of clumsy duplicative communication devices or did nothing improper or at least nothing illegal, or at least nothing indictable, or at least differently from past secretaries of State, or never sent classified material, or at least never material that was stamped officially confidential. Who then caused this scandal? The New York Times [7], Fox News, the right-wingers, the Republicans, or the Clinton-haters.

Ours is the age of constant whining — and now let me cease whining how wearisome it has all become.

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