A fate worse than Hitler

“It never occurred to me that the way I reported what I saw be analyzed by an entire nation.”

So said a previously unknown citizen, who called to report what she thought was a burglary in progress, only to find herself later excoriated as a “racist” based on words she never said being placed in her mouth.

With a trembling voice, Lucia Whalen, 40, said she was out walking to lunch in Gates’ Cambridge neighborhood near Harvard University when an elderly woman without a cell phone stopped her because she was concerned there was a possible burglary in progress.
Whalen was vilified as a racist on blogs after a police report said she described the possible burglars as “two black males with backpacks.”
Tapes of the call released earlier this week revealed that Whalen did not mention race….

Well, Andy Warhol once predicted that everyone would get to be famous for fifteen minutes.
Then Beautiful Atrocities amplified on the theme when he said that everyone would get to be Hitler for fifteen minutes.
Now it’s beginning to look like everyone will be analyzed online, and called a racist.
Eventually nothing will mean anything, if it doesn’t already.
(And everything will mean nothing — at least it did for the fifteen minutes it took to write this blog post….)
UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds links a post from Say Anything which notes that accusations of racism are being stepped up against critics of Barack Obama.
What that means is that pretty soon, everyone who opposes socialized medicine will get to be a racist!
Does everything mean nothing yet?