Yesterday and today I was shoved around and name-called by a team of leftwing p.c. mullahs and fascist feminist thugs. It was caused by their simple-minded inability to understand what I said in yesterday’s post about Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon‘s The Central Park Five, a PBS-funded doc about the 1989 Central Park Jogger rape case that I saw two days ago at the Telluride Film Festival. They were alarmed that I seemed to be making a blanket statement about the victim, a 29 year-old Salamon Brothers employee, having “all but asked” to be attacked. I wrote this because I feel she nearly did by exposing herself to serious danger in a really dicey area at a much-too-late hour.
Let’s try it again because we have some seriously thick people out there who hear only what they want to hear and who truly live to take offense and point fingers. Anyone, man or woman, child or oldster, who jogs solo through the north end of Manhattan’s Central Park at 10:30 pm, which is when and where Trisha Meili, the victim in the above-named case, was assaulted and raped, is flirting with danger. Especially if you don’t look like Muhammud Ali of the ’60s and ’70s or like present-day Jason Statham, and double especially if you’re a young woman who’s not Katniss Everdeen and carrying a hunting knife.
Central Park is a dark unlighted haven for all sorts of goings on after it gets dark, especially after 9 pm. I’m an ex-New Yorker so don’t tell me. There’s an “element” out there, Central Park is not exactly flooded with cops, and bad guys can obviously hide in the dark between bushes and trees and wait to pounce. Anyone with half a brain knows this. Trust me — tourists from Missouri and Alabama and Virginia know this. If you must run through the park after dark you need to stay within shouting distance of well-lighted areas. You definitely don’t run above 96th Street when the clock goes into double digits. And if you ignore these rules and do what Trisha Meili did that night in April 1989, you’re not “asking for it” but you might as well be for all the caution and common sense you’d be showing.
The reason I brought his up in the first place wasn’t to beat up on poor Trisha Meili, but because I found it irksome that the Burns-McMahon doc never even addressed the fact that it was clearly irresponsible to expose herself to attack, particularly given the fact that New York City in 1989 was something of a racially incendiary culture. That was all it was…until the mullahs and the fascist goons jumped in and tried to turn it into something else.
Earlier today I asked one of them if they felt that late-night solo jogging in Central Park seemed even somewhat safe to them, and if they themselves would do this if they were into jogging. They didn’t answer but the answers are obviously “no” and “no.” Boneheads.
