As a fan of Noir Fiction Novels, I’ve read through better than 2/3s of Michael Connelly’s series featuring Detective Hieronymous “Harry” Bosch. Bosch was a relentless investigator and cleared a prodigious number of cases. He also had this unfortunate yet endearing habit of sticking his foot in his mouth and failing to toe the PC line at times. One example of his crazy malapropisms was when he bruited around the personal slogan of sorts that “Everybody counts or nobody counts.”

Now that could be seen in the wrong light as being morally presumptuous. But how in the heck did a simple, basic, commendable moral sentiment like that become debatable? This sounds like a great question to invoke academic big think to answer. Fire up that hand-rolled cigarette of choice in memory of Eric Garner and let the Dorm Hall Court of Bull Hockey Sessions come to order at Smith College, where great brains are washed.

It seems that the President of Smith College has strayed beyond the Solar System of acceptable discourse. She wrote the following email in support of student protests over the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.

“We are united in our insistence that all lives matter,” read the e-mail, in which [Smith College President Kathleen McCartney] made clear she was strongly behind the [Eric Garner/Michael Brown] protests, writing that the grand jury decisions had “led to a shared fury… We gather in vigil, we raise our voices in protest.”

I peruse this vile text and at first don’t get it. I mean here we have the typical, mawkish, heart-warming Liberal concern-trolling condescension boilerplate in support of cute, little, loveable student radicals having a protest. But wait! We must deconstruct this officiously official statement of meaningless corporate solidarity. What lurks in the penumbras of this seemingly harmless flop-sweat over the Che Retardo wannabees on campus intending to prove how deeply they care?

Ah, there it is! If you squint through the lens of a powerful microscope; you’ll see that transaction show up on her White Privilege Card of Iniquity. If all people’s lives matter; then her life matters. So she’s kind of proud of her resume. What’s the big deal? We all like ourselves, even if we get up in the morning and see Sandra Fluke in the mirror. It’s a harmless externality of The Dunning-Kruger Effect.

Here’s the big hang-up. President McCartney-Smith is of The Caucasian Persuasion. You could perform an analogous process to mathematical induction on that statement. You see, what we have here is a subtle yet valid potential Base Case (n=0). President Smith is white, President Smith’s life matters. Let’s say President Smith has a jolly, old Great Uncle Norbert who really puts the Cauc in Caucasian. Everyone who knows the avuncular Norbert cares about him. If we’re not careful here, we might think his life matters too. That’s an inductive case (n=1).

Find just a few more Whities whose lives ostensibly matter and we’re in some dangerous philosophical territory. We could even go all Christianist here and make radical claims like this.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. – US Declaration of Independence

This just must.not.stand. People heard President Smith’s craziness, and they didn’t feel well. One sophomore all but accused her of baronial White Supremacy. “…it felt like she was invalidating the experience of black lives.” Now I’m pretty darn awesome –even if I brag so myself; but there’s no way I could hack some college kid’s brain and invalidate any aspect of her life experience. Maybe that’s how President Smith initially got tenure.

Another protestor of President Smith’s inadequate protest offered us the following intellectual gem.

“It minimizes the anti-blackness of this the current situation; yes, all lives matter, but not all lives are being targeted for police brutality. The black students at this school deserve to have their specific struggles and pain recognized, not dissolved into the larger student body.”

Again, I’m awesome, dapper, and I like to think fairly well read. But, I couldn’t recognize an impulse from someone else’s nervous system. Pain is not a group experience even if you meditate with Deepak Chopra. All lives should matter. Eric Garner’s would have been treated with much greater reverence and respect had our nation’s political leaders at all levels not morphed into a self-besotted faux-nobility that lords over a loathsome leviathan.

The African-American protestors have some truth on their side when they claim black lives don’t matter. They don’t matter because no aspect of the currently debased moral philosophy of Post-modern America suggests that they even should matter. Black lives don’t matter, White lives don’t matter, and Comanche Indian lives don’t matter. We have a partially Black POTUS right now who wouldn’t bother to tap a kidney on either one of the two students who took offense to President Smith if he saw them on fire. I mean once he had signed ObamaCare, he had officially cared enough already.

Until our political leadership is truly Pro-Life instead of Pro-Leviathan; neither your Black life nor my White life will matter a rat’s anal dump to the people who currently wield power and run America. President Smith and Detective Harry Bosch were both magnificently right. Everybody counts or nobody counts. #AllLivesMatter.