Something better to do

Something better to do 

I had a monster column all set to go this week. After Sunday's showdown between the "alt-right" and "alt-left" in Washington, D.C., I was sure that the fruit of a "how they're really same" piece would be hanging nice and low, practically begging for the pickin'. A year after violent clashes between "white supremacists" and "antifa" in Charlottesville, Virginia, produced a death toll, not to mention a new football for the political classes to fumble and kick around the field, the clash between neo-Nazis and neo-communists was sure to produce rocking fireworks. Throw in fawning media coverage of the leftist thugs, in combination with the fact that neo-Nazis, for all their bluster, are about as intimidating as mall security guards, and I was looking at a guaranteed target-rich environment. 

Then, everything went awry. The neo-Nazis couldn't rally enough people to fill both sides of a football field. The "antifa," deprived of assaulting "white supremacists," turned their unhinged rage on the police, and then America; proclaiming all cops to be KKK members, along with the usual "white privilege" nonsense. The media, desperate to cling to their latest narrative collapse, tried to make a couple dozen seriously sorry-looking examples of the "master race" look like the rise of the Fourth Reich, while simultaneously ignoring the fact that the "antifa" have essentially become the brownshirts of the "resistance." There was shrieking, cursing, violence and enough litter to denude acres of pristine, old-growth, forests.

And there was nothing of substance. That's when I realized: None of these people deserve anywhere near the time in public consciousness that they're allotted. Doofuses in Gap® khakis, golf shirts and tiki torches do not rank that highly on my list of people about whom I care. Freaks in theater-club body armor who spit and throw stuff are just overgrown toddlers. The only substantive differences between them is that the neo-Nazis don't wear Che' t-shirts and the antifa don't bathe frequently. If anything, antifa is more of a threat to the rest of us than Richard Spencer's nerdburgers. But really, in a proxy war between acolytes of Hitler and Stalin, I'm rooting for a 0-0 tie.

With that in mind, I gave up on writing the monster column, and watched a great final round of the PGA Championship. A white guy managed to beat a black guy, among others, in a thrilling finish in which no one got assaulted, spit on, cursed at or arrested and nothing got broken.

— Ben Crystal