By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, September 17, 2015
Ahmed Mohamed is a human Rorschach test. Look at that
face and tell me what you see: Muslim-American? African-American? I myself see
something very familiar: Nerd-American.
Mohamed, a 14-year-old high-school freshman in Texas and the
son of an immigrant family from Sudan, is a cause célèbre just at the moment
because he was handcuffed, frog-marched out of a classroom, and arrested for
the crime of showing off his technological chops by building an electronic
clock and bringing it to school to show his engineering teacher. (Let us now
praise MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas, for the fact that 14-year-olds
there have engineering teachers.) Apparently, an English teacher — it had to be
an English teacher — thought the device looked like a bomb.
It didn’t. But it looked a hell of a lot more like a bomb
than that half-eaten Pop-Tart in the possession of that seven-year-old in
Maryland looked like a gun, yet the child was suspended; it was surely more
reasonable to think that those circuit boards constituted a bomb than to think
that the bang-bang! hand gesture of a ten-year-old in Milford, Mass.,
constituted a serious threat to shoot somebody; taking a high-school kid into
custody after a teacher reports a possible bomb threat is surely no more
irrational than arresting an eighth-grader over an NRA T-shirt.
Mohamed’s father says that his son was mistreated because
the incident happened a few days after the annual commemoration of the
September 11, 2001, terror attacks, and because his name is Mohamed. The story
immediately became ubiquitous not because of what actually happened —
boneheaded as that was — but because it can be used to further a story that the
media already want to tell: that the United States is morally corrupt and
irredeemably racist; that Muslims are under siege; that “white privilege”
blinds the majority of Americans to the corruption at the heart of everything
red, white, and blue. Muslim kid meets paranoia in Texas is A-1 copy;
NRA-wearing kid meets paranoia in West Virginia, not so much.
President Barack Obama, never one to miss an opportunity
for cheap moral preening, invited Mohamed to the White House. That’s an
interesting gesture: Anybody want to hazard a guess as to what would happen if
a young man showed up at the White House visitors’ center with a backpack in
which was a homemade device full of circuit boards joined to a timing device? I
do not frequent the White House, but I often am in the House and Senate office
buildings in Washington, and my best guess is that if I’d tried to bring
Mohamed’s clock into one of those places, there would have been guns drawn.
“Oh, but those are high-security environments!” you might
be tempted to protest. Mohamed was arrested by high-school campus police in
Suburbia, Texas. Why are there police stationed at suburban high schools?
Because public schools are now a high-security environment, or at least many of
them are intended to be. That is true not only of big cities, where the
architecture of public schools is, not coincidentally, penal; public schools
far and wide across the fruited plain get the metal-detectors-and-men-with-guns
treatment.
Maybe you think that is appropriate. Maybe it is. Maybe
every nonconforming tube of outlaw Pepsodent seized by TSA agents is in reality
a blow against al-Qaeda, and maybe bright-orange plastic squirt-guns really are
a menace to police officers rolling through the malls of America in armored
vehicles. But you cannot very well go actively cultivating an atmosphere of
paranoia and then pronounce yourself surprised by all the paranoia in the air.
This is an age of overreaction.
It is, unhappily, also an age of race-hustling and
grievance-mongering. Thank goodness that felonious Pop-Tart in Maryland was one
of the strawberry-flavored ones with rainbow sprinkles and not brown
sugar/cinnamon or marshmallow hot chocolate or another of the flavors of color,
or we’d be having a national discussion about white-frosting privilege.
Of course it is the very same self-satisfied lifestyle
liberals who want to send your toddler to Gitmo for playing with a cap gun who
are so theatrically appalled at what happened to Mohamed. The structures of
paranoia that have been so assiduously fortified around our schools are there
for a purpose, and that purpose is political: to immerse young people in a
culture in which NRA literature is samizdat but how-to-fellate-your-friends
literature is mandatory, where whitewashed Islamic studies are part of the
standard curriculum and Christian prayer groups are verboten. The paranoia is
intentional, it is cultivated with exquisite care — but it isn’t supposed to
inflict collateral damage on bespectacled young men named Ahmed Mohamed. Thus,
the presidential intervention, etc.
Ahmed Mohamed was mistreated by imbeciles, and he’ll be
famous for it, for 15 Warholian minutes, and then again for a 30-second spot
when he graduates in a few years and goes off to MIT or wherever. The fact is
that he is not worse off because his name is Mohamed, but better off: Nobody
would be paying attention otherwise, and he might very well be in jail. Being
mistreated by imbeciles is the sine qua non of American public education today,
but that fact is of political use only periodically, as in this case.
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