A Colossal Wreck (25 page)

The conference opened with a formal speech by Governor Bill, and our friend noted that the attention of Arkansas’ chief executive wandered somewhat during his oration, his eyes seeming to drift with increasing frequency to a nice-looking young woman sitting in the front row. Our friend left to make preparations for the party, which indeed turned out to be a most genial occasion. Joints were fired up, Jim Guy Tucker gracefully declined the offer of Ozark homegrown and responded to enquiries about Governor Bill’s whereabouts with the news that Bill would assuredly not pass up revelry such as this. But the hours flew by and Bill didn’t show.

Then our friend encountered a young woman from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock who asked if she could get a ride home to the hotel, confiding, “I don’t know how to say this, but my roommate’s not here. I think she’s with the governor.” Our chivalrous friend drove her to the hotel and then, next morning, met her at a conference panel and asked how things had gone. She said her friend had not shown that night. An hour later who should appear but the attractive young thing our friend had seen the previous day drinking in the governor’s honeyed words in the front row. She was wearing the same clothes. Her roommate greeted her with welcoming cries and in the
girlish glow of confidence that followed, she boasted of prolonged and intimate tractations with the governor.

Some liberals take the odd view that Bill has let down the ’60s. Robert Scheer, now a syndicated columnist based at the
Los Angeles Times
, opted for this line. Scheer wrote at the end of January that if the allegations about Lewinsky were true, then it was yet more evidence that Clinton “persists in letting his generation down by betraying the sexual revolution that contained its greatest promise.” Sex in the countercultural ’60s, according to the brazen Scheer, “aspired to be a union of equals recognizing the sensual needs of women as well as of men and shunning the privileges of male power that had dominated the sexual history of this country.”

Wrong. The big complaint of the countercultural women in the ’60s was that the radical males, particularly leaders like Bob Scheer, were sexist pigs. That’s why we got the women’s movement that cranked up in 1969 (and peaked in 1974).

Against this sentimental evocation of caring ’60s males “recognizing the sensual needs of women” Scheer pilloried Bill as an “unimaginative and indeed mechanical” exponent of “vintage retro redneck sex.” Scheer should go back and read Gennifer Flowers’s delightful tell-all memoir,
Passion and Betrayal
, before he gets so snooty.

February 7

A cop would probably say it’s unfair, just coincidence, but the news stories are coming over the brow of the hill, shoulder to shoulder, and they do spell out a larger message. The police chief of Los Angeles, Bernard C. Parks, announces his department’s reckoning that ninety-nine people were framed by disgraced ex-officer-turned-informant Rafael Perez and partners. Parks is calling on DA Gil Garcetti to dismiss the cases “en masse.”

Illinois governor George Ryan suspends his state’s imposition of the death penalty, declaring that he “cannot support a system which has proven so fraught with error.” Since 1977 Illinois has executed twelve and freed thirteen from death row after their innocence had been conclusively established.

In New York, four officers are going on trial for fatally riddling an unarmed man, Amadou Diallo, with forty-one bullets.

A generation’s worth of “wars on crime” and of glorification of the men and women in blue have engendered a culture of law enforcement that is all too often viciously violent, contemptuous of the law, morally corrupt and confident of the credulity or complicity of the courts.

Those endless wars on crime and drugs have engendered not merely our two million prisoners but a vindictive hysteria that pulses on the threshold of homicide in the bosoms of many of our uniformed law enforcers. A lot of cops are walking time bombs. Even soothing words spoken to them in a calm voice can spark a red gleam in their eyes. God help you if you’re black. The other day a black man in LA described the time he spent each day figuring out routes across the city to reduce his chances of getting pulled over, maybe beaten, maybe framed, maybe imprisoned.

Police work is far from being one of America’s more dangerous occupations, but cops assiduously cultivate that impression. Police funerals are getting to be on a par with the obsequies of European royalty fifty years ago. Recently two San Francisco policemen crashed in their helicopter during a routine maintenance flight. Their funeral was attended by a huge throng of police from across California, state officials and the mayor of San Francisco. Would a city engineer or maintenance woman get this kind of send-off, even if their jobs demonstrated a higher statistical risk?

The press feeds obsessively on these “fallen hero” rituals. On January 12 in Unity, Maine, six-year-old triplets died in a house fire. County Sheriff Robert Jones, also a part-time fireman, was filling a tanker with water a couple of blocks from the blaze when he collapsed and died. It was his forty-eighth birthday. He got a hero’s send-off, with massed ranks of state cops in attendance. True, Sheriff Jones might have been on the brink of bold deeds, possibly even entailing the supreme sacrifice, but that seems a frail peg on which to hang a state funeral. These ceremonies have always been demonstration rituals designed to protect the cops’ budgetary appropriations and boost their overall image.

At least some of this often lethal cop edginess surely comes from a fractured sense of class status and function. After all, most police come from the working class and the vast majority shift class loyalty in the course of duty. Historically, this switch was recognized and fostered, especially during the time of police union organizing. In the early industrial period police wages began to run at about double those of similarly unskilled workers, and this doesn’t even take into account bonuses for strikebreaking. Better working conditions meant greater allegiance to semi-military organization. Yet despite such job perks for cops, morale often lagged. One of the grander ideas for the necessary morale boosting came from big-city mayors, elevating cop death to the status of near sainthood by flying the flag at half-mast and cajoling entire city staffs to turn out for a blue funeral.

March 6

In Monroe, Louisiana, Kathy Looney, twenty-nine, convicted of abusing three of her eight children, was ordered at the end of February to undergo medical sterilization or face lengthy jail time. District Judge Carl V. Sharp issued a ten-year suspended sentence and placed Looney on five years of probation. “I don’t want to have to lock you up to keep you from having any more children, so some kind of medical procedure is needed to make sure you don’t.” Looney’s lawyer asked the judge to reconsider.

The eugenic impulse is always lurking. These days it’s surfacing once again, not only in old-fashioned coercive sterilization such as that imposed by the Louisiana judge but in programs of genetic improvement, using all the new splicing technologies.

During the years when Americans were being involuntarily sterilized as part of a multi-state eugenics program dating back to 1907, what did the leading medical journals here have to say on the topic in their editorials?

The editorial record of the
New England Journal of Medicine
in the early 1930s was awful. Editorials lamented the supposed increase in the rate of American feeble-mindedness as dangerous and the economic burden of supporting the mentally feeble as “appalling.”
In 1934 the
Journal
’s editor, Morris Fishbein, wrote that “Germany is perhaps the most progressive nation in restricting fecundity among the unfit,” and argued that the “individual must give way to the greater good.”

But by the mid-1930s, particularly after the report from the Neurological Association and energetic interventions by the chairman of its special committee, Abraham Myerson, the
New England Journal
had a change of heart and declared that sterilization laws to prevent propagation were “unwise” and sterilization should not be mandatory. The
Journal of the American Medical Association
followed the same curve.

In 1974 US District Court Judge Gerhard Gesell said that “Over the last few years, an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 low-income persons have been sterilized annually in federally funded programs.” The late Allan Chase quoted this in his great book
The Legacy of Malthus
, and noted that the US rate equaled that of Nazi Germany where the twelve-year career of the Third Reich after the German Sterilization Act of 1933 (in part inspired by US laws) saw two million Germans sterilized as social inadequates.

Gesell pointed out that though Congress had decreed that family planning programs function on a voluntary basis “an indefinite number of poor people have been improperly coerced into accepting a sterilization operation under the threat that various federally funded benefits would be withdrawn. Patients receiving Medicaid assistance at childbirth are evidently the most frequent targets of this pressure.”

Starting in the early 1990s poor women were allowed by Medicaid funding to have Norplant inserted into their arms, then when they complained of pain and other unwelcome side effects they were told no funding was available to have the Norplant rods taken out.

April 14

I got an invitation to speak a couple of months ago from an outfit called
antiwar.com
, which is run by a young fellow called Justin Raimundo. “
Antiwar.com
is having its second annual national conference March
24 and 25, and we’d like you to be the luncheon speaker,” Raimundo wrote. “The conference will be held at the Villa Hotel, in San Mateo (near the airport). The theme of the conference is ‘Beyond Left and Right: The New Face of the Antiwar Movement.’ We have invited a number of speakers spanning the political spectrum. Confirmed so far: Patrick J. Buchanan, Tom Fleming (of
Chronicles
magazine), Justin Raimondo (
Antiwar.com
), Kathy Kelly (Iraq Aid), Alan Bock (Orange County Register), Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), representatives of the Serbian Unity Congress, and a host of others.”

Raimundo seasoned his invite with a burnt offering, in the form of flattery, always pleasing to the nostrils: “All of us here at
Antiwar.com
are big fans of your writing: we met, once, at a meeting during the Kosovo war where you bravely took up the fight for the united front left-right alliance against imperialist war. We can promise you a small honorarium, a lunch, free admission to all conference events—and a good time.”

As a seasoned analyst of such communications, my eye of course fell sadly upon the words “small honorarium,” a phrase that in my case usually means somewhere between $150 and $350. Being a libertarian Justin had boldly added the prospect of a “good time.” Leftist invitations rarely admit this possibility in formal political communications, even in the distant days when the left supposedly had a lock on drugs and sex.

I said I’d be happy to join in such an enterprise, and in due course got some angry e-mails from lefties who seem to feel that any proximity to Buchanan is a crime, even if the subject was gardening.

I chose the ’67 convertible as properly defiant of the auto-safety lobby and headed south from Berkeley. This was most emphatically a shirt-and-tie, skirt-and-nice-shoes crowd. Justin Raimundo was draped in the sort of gray pinstripe favored by London gents when they want a holiday from blue. But all the same the folks were unmistakably libertarians, not Democrats or Republicans. Democrats would have been more casual, Republicans far more assertive. From the podium I gazed out at white faces, seeing only two black countenances, one of them unmistakably that of yet another liberal bête-to-hate, Lenora Fulani.

Their amiable hilarity at my sallies reminded me of Goldsmith’s lines in “The Deserted Village” about the pupils of the country schoolmaster: “Full well they laughed with counterfeited glee / At all his jokes, and many a joke had he.” (How many people have read the whole of that wonderful poem, one of the most savage denunciations of free trade ever written?)

“Can we unite,” I asked the crowd, “on the anti-war platform? We have already, in the case of Kosovo for example. But where would you as libertarians want to get off the leftist bus? A leftist says ‘Capitalism leads to war. Capitalism needs war.’ But you libertarians are pro-capitalism, so you presumably have a view of capitalism as a system not inevitably producing or needing war. Lefties have always said capitalism has to maximize its profits and the only way you can maximize profits in the end is by imperial war, which was the old Lenin thesis …

“I think the old categories are gone. I see no virtue to them. I see Bernie Sanders listed as an Independent Socialist in the US Congress. I see what Bernie Sanders has supported, starting with the war in Kosovo. And then I see Ron Paul, on the other hand, writing stuff against war which could have been written by Tom Hayden in 1967.”

Driving back to Berkeley with $300 in cash in my pocket, I mentally toasted
antiwar.com
. Alas, not many leftists will ever want to have much to do with them.

April 18

At the end of April we’ll have arrived at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, when the last fugitives clambered into helicopters at the US Embassy compound in Saigon.

For years the anti-war left was told to be embarrassed about the ’60s, put through re-education rites designed to elicit the confession that “excesses” were committed, mistakes made. Of course mistakes were made, starting with the failure to stop the war eight years earlier, in 1967. We misread the larger calendar. After Tet, after the May–June events in Paris, we thought revolution was around the corner. The Tet Offensive of 1968 remains one of the
great moments of the twentieth century, even though one can see in retrospect that General Giap’s desperate throw signaled the fact that the Americans had indeed been successful in exterminating the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam. We make mistakes all the time, again and again, however much we try to “draw the correct lessons.” Big deal. History isn’t like a bus, conveniently carrying a destination sign above the windshield. Every time I go to a political gathering on the left, it’s filled with people, self included, who have made mistakes about the way history was headed, about the vulnerability of capitalism, but who were on the right track all the same. The most mistaken people of all are those so frightened of making mistakes they end up missing the right bus when it finally comes round the corner.