This Noble Land (20 page)

I must temper my remarks by explaining that I had a favorable introduction to Title IX at the University of Texas, which had enjoyed one of the most sensible and mature programs for women. Under the sage administration of Donna Lopiano, who went on to become the executive director of the Women’s Sports Foundation, and with the coaching brilliance of Jody Conradt, Texas fielded women’s basketball teams that went undefeated through long seasons, capturing national championships en route. I was a big supporter of those teams and those coaches, and had Title IX been as equally honored on all campuses the scandal of women athletes’ being denigrated and cheated would not have occurred. Because of Donna Lopiano’s determination to win just rights for her women, conditions are marginally better now, but the struggle goes on.

Not only does sport dominate much of our national life, it is becoming more violent. I recall the National Football League’s sale of a videotape consisting of near-lethal collisions when three-hundred-pound tackles smashed into running backs weighing two hundred fifty. The viewer was numbed by the violence, and I later observed that the league finally stopped showing the tape; it was too brutal to represent what was supposed to be a game. In the broadcasting of sports events, however, emphasis is still given to massive collisions. The often-used shot of two rams with enormous horns smashing into each other seems to serve as a paradigm for how humans should behave. Men’s ice hockey with its extravagant brutality (much of it staged, I suspect) is finding a growing audience and new arenas in the American South—Miami, Tampa Bay, Dallas—for its preposterous
machismo. When I wrote my book on sports in America twenty years ago I refused to take either boxing or ice hockey seriously because, as I told my editor: ‘I’m pretty sure hockey with its staged brutality will fade away before long. The public will reject the gladiator approach.’ I also predicted that if basketball didn’t clean up its act it would lose customers. How wrong I was! Hockey has not only expanded into ever-widening markets but has even lured men’s basketball into putting on spurious clashes between its giant players. Ten years from now there will probably be ten more cities with hockey or basketball teams. So much for my crystal ball. America’s macho exhibitions make the bottom lines of the year-end financial reports tingle with the clink of cash. We want our sports to be violent and, as we have seen, this desire stems from a long tradition of violence in many aspects of American life. Our macho attitudes toward violence are making of us a Sparta rather than an Athens.

While working on this segment I noted how news about three representatives of our macho society dominated TV coverage of national events. First, the O. J. Simpson trial fascinated the public. Although the majority of people reported to the pollsters that they believed him guilty, many also believed he should go free because he was, after all, a charismatic football hero. Second, the media devoted tremendous amounts of space to Duke Snider and his pleading guilty to tax fraud; the public was willing to forgive him because he was a baseball Hall of Famer. Third, the African American community of Harlem in New York City planned a gala celebration honoring the boxer Mike Tyson, and the leaders of the area eagerly volunteered not only to participate in the affair but also to lead it. Those TV messages involved a football player who was a confessed wife beater, a baseball player who was an admitted tax evader and a boxer who spent three years in jail on a rape conviction. What does
the nomination of these three as American heroes and role models reveal about our value system?

T
he most instructive proof of our nation’s increasingly vigorous move toward a macho society can be seen in our unique fascination with guns, our insistence on having them and our willingness to accept murder as a result of the huge number we allow and even encourage private citizens to own.

Bob Herbert, a columnist for
The New York Times
, in his Op-Ed piece for March 2, 1994, offered some shattering statistics: ‘In 1992, handguns were used in the murders of 33 people in Great Britain, 36 in Sweden, 97 in Switzerland, 128 in Canada, 13 in Australia, 60 in Japan, and 13,220 in the United States.’ We are the murder capital of the world; most of our killings are done by persons using handguns. Herbert continued with other astonishing data: that one year’s total of 38,317 citizens killed by firearms was more than the total number of American troops killed in battle in the Korean War.

In American history the weapon of choice has been the handgun in attempts to assassinate U.S. presidents. Here is the record:

In addition, in 1933 President-elect Franklin Roosevelt was nearly murdered when a bricklayer named Giuseppe Zangara shot at him but killed Mayor Anton Joseph Cermak of Chicago instead. In 1950 President Harry Truman was shot at by Puerto Rican radicals. President Gerald Ford was shot at twice in 1975 by deranged women, and in 1981 President Ronald Reagan was nearly assassinated by John Hinckley, Jr.

This is a record of shame that no other civilized nation can even approach. The national outcry against the killing and the near misses has not been sustained; it has been tempered by absurd claims that a loss of our rights to own handguns, even machine guns, might destroy the U.S. Constitution. One is tempted to conclude: ‘Americans are willing to have their presidents murdered if it means that citizens can keep their guns. It’s a risk that goes with the job.’

The data just cited regarding the proliferation of guns in our country and our record of assassinating our presidents, let alone such distinguished citizens as Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, can perhaps be explained by the fact that we remain a frontier society. When I lived in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts or New York, I could not understand the American passion for guns, but when I lived in Colorado and Texas I saw that otherwise sensible men could have monomaniacal fixations on their firearms. To a man in Wyoming or Montana, a gun is an entirely different weapon from what it is in Pennsylvania. In the western states it is a badge of honor, a memorial of the good old days when men defended their isolated homes against the threats of the wilderness. Their firearms are the ultimate proof of their machismo. I knew ranchers who confessed that they would give up their wives rather than surrender their guns. I also watched as they became fanatical supporters of the National Rifle Association and relied upon it as the protector of their rights as a man.

The National Rifle Association, with its brilliant public relations, is one of the prime forces in establishing and augmenting our devotion to the gun. After the 1994 election it issued a handsome pamphlet showing on one page the portraits of thirty-two politicians who had dared to vote for gun control, and on the second page the same thirty-two portraits, each stamped across the face with a red-letter
DEFEATED
.

If you doubt the power of the NRA I suggest that you write for a copy of their
Ten Myths about Gun Control
, a twenty-nine-page pamphlet that brilliantly rebuts every argument put forward against guns or advocating their control. The writing is first-rate, and the possession of a gun is equated with patriotism. There is an amusing argument that the 87 gun murders in Japan in 1990 are really equivalent to the 10,567 killed in the United States. Further, the proliferation of guns in our country has nothing to do with the murders; the murder rate is merely a difference between national cultures.

I hear the same arguments from the gun owners I know. If I try to recite the appalling statistics on accidental deaths from gunfire, they counter with statements difficult to refute: ‘Guns are the American way They differentiate us from weaker nations like France or Belgium.’ By implication the speakers reveal that they think the difference lies in the historic fact that we honor the existence of a macho ideal, while other nations do not.

From such experiences I have concluded that there is nothing we can do to staunch the bloodshed caused by the gun. As a nation, too many of us want it that way We want any citizen other than a criminal already in jail to have the right to own an automatic crowd-killer that can mow down patrons dining peacefully in a McDonald’s hamburger joint (twenty-one dead) or a Killeen, Texas, cafeteria (twenty-three dead).

There have been too many ‘hunting’ accidents. In Maine a wife went out into her own backyard wearing white mittens. A hunter
saw the flash of white and, concluding he had a deer in his sights, blazed away and killed her. When the gunman was belatedly brought to trial, the Maine jury refused to find him guilty: ‘It was her fault. She should have known better than to wear those white gloves.’

At the bottom of my lane in Pennsylvania, a child waiting for a school bus was shot to death and the hunter’s excuse was: ‘He moved, didn’t he?’

Sometime later I was sitting at my desk in my house at the top of the hill when a phone call came that took me to another room. In my absence from my desk, a hunter saw a reflection in my window and, thinking it was a deer, fired two bullets through my window Had I still been sitting there, I would have been murdered.

There were other shooting incidents that were more chilling because the killing was intentional. While working on a manuscript in Miami I became aware that my daily newspaper was carrying a sequence of stories that were almost identical with this one: ‘Rafael Lopez, football star and straight-A student at Wellover High, was shot to death in chemistry lab by a fifteen-year-old boy who felt that Lopez did not pay him adequate respect.’

When I started to ask about these killings during school hours, I learned that in my county alone over the period of a year, eighteen schoolchildren had been slain by guns while attending classes, more than the total number of gun killings in the entire nation of Australia. Bob Herbert in his previously cited
New York Times
article reported: ‘An average of fourteen children and teenagers are killed with guns each day. Firearms kill more people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four than all other causes combined.’

It seems to me that this particular form of firearm death could be easily controlled because, after all, most children could be easily protected in their school buildings. But an experienced
teacher corrected me: ‘Not so. Hoodlums sneak into the school to execute revenge murders. Since a shocking number of schoolchildren bring hidden guns to class with them, the deaths will continue.’ As if to confirm that prediction, a few weeks after that conversation the Supreme Court reversed a law that had banned guns within a thousand yards of any school. In effect the justices said that gun owners have constitutional rights that take precedence over the rights of children to continue living.

I believe that guns are such an integral part of American society, so deeply ingrained in our national psyche, that we will never be able to bring them under control. The people west of the Mississippi will not allow it. We have chosen the path of Sparta, not Athens, and we may not be able to rectify that wrong decision.

A
disturbing development is the proliferation, especially in the West and the South, of so-called militia units. These are paramilitary groups of men and women with guns and uniforms who train like soldiers in the countryside, practicing against the day when they may have to defend themselves against the tyranny of the government.

Historically their roots reach far back in American history. When I was a boy in a Pennsylvania town the highlight of the year so far as public spectacles were concerned was the Fourth of July parade in which the marchers included veterans of the Civil War. In a neighboring town we had a man whose proud accomplishment was his membership in the time-honored Philadelphia Cavalry, which dated back to the Revolutionary War. His uniform was a dazzling affair seen to good advantage whenever the Cavalry formed the guard of honor for notables who visited Philadelphia.

There were also the men’s organizations that reenacted Civil War battles wearing uniforms of the period, but the one that capped them all was the re-creation of George Washington’s crossing the Delaware River on December 26 to take the British army by surprise in the Battle of Trenton. We had a man who looked a spitting image of Washington, we had the boat and the cadre of patriots who crossed the river at the exact spot where Washington did. One winter I was Colonel Knox, Washington’s aide, and nearly froze in the bitter cold.

None of these military reenactments did any harm; they simply reminded us of our glorious history. But about 1960 a different element of society took over the celebrations and injected a darker agenda. Across the nation this element was able to convert many of the harmless military celebrations into celebrations of the so-called militia with its doctrine of hatred of our civil government and its plan to take control when enough militias functioned in the states, especially west of the Mississippi. They constitute a perversion of our American heritage; it is true that the colonial militia organizations such as the minutemen took up arms in defiance of their government, but the monarchical government in England was truly oppressive and the colonies could not resort to the ballot box in order to improve their lot.

The members of the militias are intensely patriotic, and they yearn to return to the good old days of family solidarity. They despise our present government, especially if it happens to be in Democratic hands; they are committed both to their beliefs that the government is secretly plotting to deprive them of their freedoms and to their intrigues against the government. While they are not openly racist, they are preponderantly white Anglo-Saxons and their ranks provide a haven for those who fear the ultimate domination of the races of color, whether the imagined enemy happens to be black, brown or yellow.