Philosophizing disgrace: Take me down, little Susie

As Josh White and Jennifer Buske of The Washington Post report:

“The situation was as disturbing as it was cruel: three girls, trapped in a bedroom tainted with urine and feces, a piece of drywall nailed across the door. The people responsible, police say, were their parents.

“The neighbors could not wake the couple because they were out cold, the records say. Officers said they found prescription narcotics, smoking devices and needles in the room.”

It looks from the pictures like a mainstream, middle-class house in Bristol, Va., like one of those things safe and snug built recently into a cul-de-sac in the new exurbs of D.C. on land that was only recently grass, cattle and farmers newly born again to Jesus.

Then one astonishing 4-year-old, “the oldest, scaled the drywall. She ran to a neighbor, who tore down the makeshift barricade and rescued her 2-year-old and 6-month-old sisters, who were naked and filthy.”

It is important to ask certain questions as we go into 2012. Reality questions of the candidates, like, "but can you change a diaper?” And other questions like how did we get to this? Where did it start? Who let this happen? When exactly did it start? And this one especially: Can America be saved with situations like this occurring in the mainstream? The answer is emphatically no, of course not, unless we find again the character and primal instinct and spine of the 4-year-old girl in Bristow.

When I left San Francisco for Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon in August 1967, America was high-minded, mourning the death of poor Hattie Carroll: “But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears, take the rag away from your face. Now ain’t the time for your tears.”

When I returned, a year later to the day, the same troubadour had advised us, “Everybody must get stoned.” And everybody was.

It is all but unbelievable that the agents calling then for the pleasant friendship of “junkie love” and romanticizing the basement room, “with a needle and a spoon,” their memoirs of smack and squalor at the top of the list at The New York Times, today charm the new Congresses coming into Washington, D.C., and share the celebrity box at the world soccer matches with BFF Bill Clinton.

How did the three girls in Bristow get here from there? you ask.

Visit Mr. Quigley's website at http://quigleyblog.blogspot.com.