I could only with to be so erudite

Ever heard of a bloke called Andrew Bolt?  He's a staff columnist for the Herald-Sun.

This may be one of the best newspaper articles I have ever read.

DEBBIE Webbe knew exactly who to blame when her daughter’s criminal boyfriend ploughed his stolen car into a young family’s little Mazda, killing himself and three others.

“I blame the police totally,” she said.

“I want the police to pay for what happened,” she added on A Current Affair, for which she wore a sleeveless shirt to better show her tatt, a symbol of the new barbarianism that is actually behind this tragedy.

Yes, I understand everyone wants to be kind and non-judgmental to Webbe, whose daughter Skye got in that stolen car with Justin Charles Williams and now lies critically ill in hospital.

Oh, hear the poor mother’s sobs on radio or on TV, while interviewers murmur their pitying there-theres - even as she crucifies the cops.

Oh, you poor dear, Mrs Webbe. So let’s not ask this tattooed lady in her moment of grief why she let her daughter go out with a twice-jailed 23-year-old father of three who’d been stealing cars since he was eight.

Let’s not ask this poor sniffing mum how she raised a daughter who’d admire a man with 37 convictions - a man Webbe in one interview said she knew had tried to outrun the police just last year, and who nearly killed himself in a crash then, too.

Let’s not ask what values she passes on to her children when even now she claims Williams was “not a bad kid”, “OK” and guilty only of a “petty little crime” after getting “a bit mixed up in the criminal world”.

Oh, I see, Mrs Webbe. There are no real criminals, right? Just the nice people you know who by pure chance mix with some faceless baddies, and can’t possibly be blamed when they steal other people’s cars, break into their houses, use false number plates, give two fingers to court orders, drive like death, flee the police and kill two parents and their baby, Brody.

You look at this mayhem and conclude ... what? That it could have happened to anyone?

You see the savage consequences of a savage acting savagely and “totally” blame ... the police?

But savaging the police for chasing Williams to his death is to blame the one symbol of authority that’s done its job - this time, at least.

Blame people we must, but let’s blame Williams first, along with the exhausted institutions that helped to produce a toxic culture in which such a feral could thrive and run so amok.

Blame this culture that later left its calling card at the crash site - not just flowers, but bottles of Jim Beam. It’s a sly grief that nudges other ferals even closer to their own moronic deaths. Taking some of us with them.

This is a tragedy which - like the more dramatic Jaidyn Leskie killing in Moe, or the murder of Anita Cobby, or the rape and execution of the Bega schoolgirls, or the Snowtown killings - seems to lift a rock on a subculture we usually ignore, since it’s so scary to confront.

Here’s some details you should know before you’re tempted to blame the police, too, as the authors of Williams’ death.

Williams was a serial lawbreaker who’d faced court at least once a year since he turned 18.

Again and again he’d breached good behaviour bonds the courts imposed in the deluded belief that such a man could behave well.

At least twice before his death ride he’d tried to outdrive police in cars he’d stolen, once mounting a bike path and last year crashing so badly he was in a coma for three weeks.

Even as recently as two weeks ago he was still triumphant in his contempt for the laws he’d trashed so often and the authority he’d never recognised.

On the “F--- the police” Facebook page he wrote underneath a picture of a crashed police car, “HOPE THE LIL DOGS ARE DEAD.”

He had excuses, of course. To get off his latest charges, he reportedly planned to argue he was unfit to plead because of brain injuries he suffered in last year’s crash.

He also complained he had attention deficit disorder, was illiterate, and had been thrown out of school “too many times to remember” for such things as threatening teachers and students.

And his background sounds precisely as you’d expect - another train wreck so typical of these no-responsibility times of breed ‘em and leave. Of broken promises of ‘til death us do part. Of a giddy freedom that leaves the weak falling through an endless vacuum.

He was the fourth of 10 children, his sister Tania-Lee says, and his own father left when he was just four. He alleged he’d been physically abused by a relative.

But, of course, he’d since repeated the very pattern of which he claimed he was a victim.

At just 23, this convicted criminal, who’d never held a job for long, had already fathered three children with a girlfriend he left last year, literally holding the baby.

How mad it is, that the Federal Government pays even criminals, addicts and assorted ferals to reproduce, $5000 a baby, rather than pay only to have their offspring at least made fit for society.

What a world we are literally creating. Two centuries ago in Britain, the rich outbred the poor, and pushed their values down the social scale. Now the poor - many virtuous, yes, but others lazy, careless or unsocialised - outbreed the rich, and the mob’s values are pushed up.

Am I too pessimistic? Too damning and arrogant, even in this week when 2000 fools can block a highway near my home, loot a Bob Jane shop, hoot the police and bash a photographer just because they didn’t get to see some dragsters?

If so, forgive me, because one final detail of Saturday’s smash sealed the grim deal for me. Guess who Williams killed on Saturday, scything through their car at 200km/h?

Friends of his, actually, both with criminal records themselves for offences involving drugs, and with eight children from previous relationships.

Now you have the details, so let’s do that blame thing, but properly this time.

No, I don’t blame police for chasing a lunatic driver in a stolen car.

I blame Justin Charles Williams for being a good-for-nothing.

I blame his parents for not sticking together and raising a boy to be a civilised man.

I blame those friends and relatives who praised in him what they should have condemned.

After them, I blame the schools and welfare officials for not grabbing Williams when he was young and already dangerous, and trying to make him straight, rather than turn him loose on our streets.

I blame the courts for giving him more chances than he ever planned to take, and leaving him free to steal yet another car for his last deadly drive.

I blame all of us for creating a culture that tells the feckless there’s no dishonour in leaving your children, or in betraying your most solemn duty to your spouse.

I blame all of us for killing shame, and for kicking to pieces the stern guides of tradition and faith that the brainless badly need in their trackless lives.

I blame the “reformers” who stripped our courts and police of their once intimidating authority.

I blame a government that throws money at the shiftless and that finances incivility.

And I blame those who, when a crook crashes and burns, blame first those few who at least tried to hold him to account.
 
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