ShoutyBear: Politics. Foreign Affairs. Zarf.

Judging by the Comments page, reader reaction to the Washington Post’s year-long 12-part investigative series into the 2001 disappearance of 24-year-old intern Chandra Levy is mostly negative — even downright ugly.  

I get why readers think this series is a waste of the WaPo’s time, having suffered from Missing White Woman fatigue myself at a certain cable news network. But I also get why this is still a story. This woman’s murderer is possibly still at large and still wandering the District. The media frenzy over the case destroyed a congressman’s career, possibly unjustly. And readers still interested in the story should not be judged too harshly, either. Releasing your child into the world requires a certain amount of good faith. Parents cannot be faulted for worrying over the ways in which that faith can be broken.

That said, I can’t help sharing an anecdote from PeePeeBear. Without going too heavily into racial politics, the MSM and what-have-you, here it is:

In the spring of 2005 or so (his residency is a blur), PeePeeBear was doing a surgery/trauma rotation at a regional hospital that I won’t name. At around 3 in the morning on a Tuesday night, a 16-year-old black teenager was admitted to the trauma unit after being hit by a car.

PeePeeBear was working under the unit’s attending surgeon, a bear of a black man at more than 6 feet tall and 300 pounds-plus. To PeePee’s great shock, the attending laid into the kid with an expletive-rich spanking.

“Tell me something. What the fuck are you doing walking around at 3 in the morning on a Tuesday? What’s your momma saying?”

His momma wasn’t saying nothing, the kid said. He lived in a group home.

“You remember that Chandra Levy girl?” the attending asked.

“Yeah,” the kid said, in what was to be a series of one-word responses.

“She got killed four years ago and people still talking about her,” the attending continued. ”You could get killed tomorrow and you wouldn’t even make the papers.

“You got to do for yourself. Ain’t nobody gonna do shit for you.”

The kid appeared startled and duly shamed. PeePee, for his part, knew that the attending committed a big no-no in doctor-patient relations. But he couldn’t help feeling a little awe and admiration.

All these years later, it turns out people are still talking about Chandra Levy. I wonder what’s become of that kid.