Short News and Commentary
WHATEVER YOU DO,
DON’T MAKE A SCENE
At the beginning of the 105th Congress, House Republicans came on like the king of the jungle, roaring at Beltway bandits by enacting Rep. John Doolittle’s (R-Calif.) Truth in Testimony sunshine rule, requiring witnesses who appear before House committees and subcommittees to reveal all federal grants and contracts they (or their organization) have received in the past three years.
The lion’s roar was almost immediately drowned out by the pitter-patter of paws in retreat, as Congress lost courage on racial preferences, the National Endowment for the Arts, and much more. As part of this retreat, some Republicans gave up the Truth in Testimony weapon they had only just fashioned for the fight against bloated government.
Squishy Representatives and even some conservatives were scared off by big business and big labor, the two-headed monster feeding on the $250 billion worth of federal contracts and grants awarded each year. In the Committee on Education and the Workforce, in particular, representatives of big business and big labor successfully dodged full-disclosure requirements.
House Democrats—who had previously never met a government requirement they didn’t love—suddenly were disturbed by the paperwork burden of the full-disclosure rule. Republicans also felt sorry for multibillion-dollar conglomerates who might be embarrassed by the requirement. According to press reports, when trw—which receives nearly $3 billion in federal tax dollars—balked at advertising their reliance on government money, a trw employee was allowed to testify in a "personal capacity" (without disclosure) at a February 5 hearing.
At the same hearing, the afl-cio avoided disclosing the millions in federal largesse it has received over the past three years. This spectacle was repeated again on February 11, in a hearing on reforming federal job training programs. This time, the afl-cio flat out lied: it denied receiving job-training funds, even though its Human Resources Development Institute is a grantee of the Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration. The penalty for this lawbreaking? Not even a slap on the wrist.
While Republicans were busy undermining their own reform, Nan Aron of the Alliance for Justice and her cabal of taxpayer-funded radical lawyers were eagerly stretching every conceivable loophole to avoid compliance with the rule. Commenting on this sad spectacle, the Houston Chronicle editorialized for strict enforcement of Truth in Testimony, reminding the House that "public money does not belong to…big business or labor unions."
But by then Republican knees were buckling. In early March, Rep. Tom Campbell (R-Calif.) joined forces with Rep. David Skaggs (D-Colo.) on a bill that would repeal the Doolittle rule. Their claim: Truth in
Testimony intimidates witnesses!
The good news is that Truth in Testimony has the firm backing of Rules Committee Chairman Gerald Solomon (R-N.Y.), and will remain a House rule. The committees that have been so lax about the law are reportedly tightening their enforcement. And technology may soon compensate for cowardice: Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.) is drafting the "Federal Funding Electronic Disclosure Act of 1997," which would require the General Services Administration to create, at minimal cost, an easily accessible, search-friendly World Wide Web site to catalogue recipients of federal grants and contracts. Speaker Gingrich is enthralled by the proposal, and, if it passes, groups that gobble taxpayer dollars will soon have no way to hide that fact.
—Kenneth R. Weinstein is director of the Government Reform Project at the Heritage Foundation.
That Ole Devil, Partisanship
In his State of the Union address, President Clinton said of the Cold War: "One of the greatest sources of our strength throughout the Cold War was a bipartisan foreign policy.… Because our future was at stake, politics stopped at the water’s edge."
What? Politics did not stop at the water’s edge. That’s where politics truly heated up. The bipartisan consensus on fighting the Cold War lasted approximately from 1945 to 1965. The period of 1965 to 1989, it seems absurd to have to remind people, was a period of profound and bitter division over foreign policy.
The Republican party remained committed to opposing communism. That commitment took many forms. It meant support for a very strong and technologically advanced American military. (The Democrats decried spending for weapons "we don’t need and that don’t work.") It meant support for the government of South Vietnam (which Democrats opposed, spelling Vietnam’s doom). It meant support for the various freedom-fighter movements around the globe—the contras in Nicaragua, the mujahadeen of Afghanistan, and Jonas Savimbi’s forces in Angola. Most of all, opposition to world communism meant a muscular and firm antipathy to the Soviet Union and its interests.
Date it however you like (the Tet offensive of 1968?), but at a certain point between 1965 and 1970, most of the Democratic party simply resigned from fighting the Cold War. There is no other way to say it.
For the Democratic party, the Vietnam War was not just an unsuccessful or unfortunate move on the Cold War chessboard. It marked instead a sea change in the way Democrats saw the United States. For Democrats, Vietnam undermined the entire anti-communist enterprise. The struggle for South Vietnam’s freedom came to be seen as pointless or, worse, an effort to impose America’s corrupt system abroad. And Democrats began viewing the Cold War in terms of moral equivalence—merely two giants maneuvering for power.
Starting with the cutoff of aid to South Vietnam in 1974, the Democratic Congress opposed nearly every significant Cold War policy. Richard Perle, assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration (and dubbed the "Prince of Darkness" by those who preferred a softer line toward the Soviets), recalls that during sensitive arms-control negotiations with the Soviet Union, the Democrats in Congress were constantly undercutting the administration’s position by floating alternative policies of their own.
Does anyone remember the nuclear freeze or the massive national argument over deployment of Pershing missiles in Europe? Do the words Strategic Defense Initiative ring any bells? Has everyone forgotten the clash over Central America?
There was a time, before the Cold War was won, when the term "cold warrior" was a term of derision. It was applied to people who were too nationalistic, "too one-dimensional" in their distrust of the Soviet Union, and insufficiently committed to "peace."
Has President Clinton perhaps forgotten the "Dear Commandante" letter then-House Majority Leader Jim Wright wrote to the communist leader of Nicaragua while Reagan was seeking aid to the contras? The letter expressed support and hoped that he’d tone down the internal repression a bit to help defeat contra aid. Has he forgotten that Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) traveled to Nicaragua to urge then-editor Violetta Chamorro to accept press censorship in the interests of peace? Has he forgotten the scorn with which Reagan’s speech labeling the Soviet Union an "evil empire" was greeted in Democratic circles?
President Clinton has forgotten none of this. Heck, he was demonstrating against America’s Vietnam policy in Oxford, England. But the Cold War has since been won. The former Soviets have acknowledged that they were an evil empire and that Reagan’s saying so—and strengthening the American military—helped bring it down.
The debate over how or indeed whether to fight communism dominated the last 25 years as did no other issue. The cold warriors turned out to be right—which is why President Clinton, who was on the other side, is obscuring the history now.
—Mona Charen is a syndicated columnist and former White House speechwriter.
LEARNING ABOUT LOVE ON CAMPUS
A report from the March 1 edition of the nbc Nightly News:
" It’s not exactly what college dating used to be. In fact, on campuses these days, when they talk about meeting the right person, they don’t talk about for how long.
Betty Rollin reporting: It’s the start of a typical social evening at the University of Michigan, and everybody knows the routine. You gather in somebody’s room or apartment, you talk, you horse around, and mainly you drink. Then:
Ms. Jenny Veve (University of Michigan senior): Once you’ve got the buzz, once you’re feeling ready, then we’ll head over to a bar, and then as soon as we get in, you get another drink.
Rollin: And another, and another after that. Although studies show some decline in campus drinking, the number of binge drinkers has remained constant, and has gone up among women. And drinking, these kids say, often leads to what they call "hooking up," the ’90s term for one-night stands.
Ms. Veve: It’s when you go to the bar and you’re drunk enough to go home with somebody. You usually take him back to your place, and basically it’s just straight sex. You could pass that person on the street the next day and act like you don’t know them.
Rollin: This suits Adam Clampitt and his friends just fine.
Mr. Adam Clampitt (University of Michigan senior): I had a need, I fulfilled it, and there’s no commitment afterwards. And I think that’s very attractive.
Rollin: It beats dating, says Chris McAnna practice which on this campus and others is history.
Mr. Chris Mcann (University of Michigan senior): Dating takes a lot of time, it costs a lot of money, and also I think out of the little time that you have, you want to kind of maximize what you get out of it.
Rollin: And what do the women get out of it? Like the men, sex without strings, though some don’t approve.
Unidentified Girl #1: They go home, they use you, and that’s it. They never call, you never hear from them again.
Unidentified Girl #2: Think about when you’re drunk, do you really think about protection? No.
Rollin: Unsurprisingly, among college age women, about one in seven has some kind of sexually transmitted disease. All of this is part of a major social change on campus, and not only here at Michigan. A recent study of more than 9,000 students at 30 colleges and universities nationwide found that students avoid committed relationships, and for many of the same reasons.
Dr. Arthur Levine (Columbia University): They see relationships as not a plus that can sustain them, they see it as a liability that could potentially drag them down.
Rollin: That one-third of the students’ parents are divorced also plays a role.
Mr. Clampitt: My parents were divorced when I was very young, when I was six years old, and I haven’t seen a real relationship.
Rollin: And as Jenny says, many college women today don’t demand one.
Ms. Veve: Women will sleep with men the first night, randomly, and as long as that is going on, I really don’t see why men feel the need to date.
Rollin: And if they do, Dr. Levine’s study shows that old-fashioned daters are knocked.
Dr. Levine: The term used for people who coupled up early in college is "Velcro twins"; they go everywhere together, they do everything together.
Rollin: The results of these new social patterns are not yet known, but Dr. Levine says that many of these kids want a future very different from their present.
Dr. Levine: This is a group that talks about marriage, and kids, and the traditional family as a goal for life.
Rollin: But the social lessons they’re learning on campus, he says, are more about sex than love, more about getting than giving.
WELFARE TOUGHNESS HAVING RESULTS
Something very interesting is happening on the welfare front. Back in March 1994, the afdc caseload nationwide totaled 14.4 million recipients. By December 1996 it had fallen to 11.5 million, a remarkable 20 percent reduction. And the trend is still accelerating—fully 650,000 recipients left the rolls in just the last four months of 1996.
What’s happening? Well, since 1994 the country has gotten a Republican Congress, undergone a loud welfare debate, and finally passed a reasonably stern welfare reform bill. But of course that bill’s measures are only just beginning to go into effect, and won’t be felt fully for years. So, again, what’s going on?
The so-called "psychological bomb" is what’s going on (or, more properly, going off). American Enterprise Institute fellow Ben Wattenberg explains:
"Those in and around the welfare system believe the end is nigh. The word is on the street about two-year time limits, five-year time limits, immediate work requirements, and new certification requirements. All this, mixed with denunciations of heartless conservatives who would throw babies into the street, has scared people in poverty communities."
"If a recipient who has been working off-the-books is told that an on-the-books job will now be required at the very hours the recipient had been working off-the-books, that recipient may ‘vanish.’ Other cases of fraud or near-fraud are also disappearing as the rhetoric and reality of a crackdown continues. Legitimate recipients are making more serious efforts to get off the dole. What’s happening here could be big-time. Tough love may be lovely stuff."
The ’60s and America’s Underclass
For the past three years, Booker Stallworth, a senior in political science at the University of Pittsburgh, has been the publisher of The Phoenix, a student newspaper at Pitt and Carnegie-Mellon University. "Editorially, we’re libertarian and conservative," he explains.
Stallworth is black. "For three years," he says, "people on campus have told me that I can’t be black and conservative." His reply? "How can a black person not be a conservative? As a black person, I know what government-controlled living is like."
Stallworth links the pathologies in today’s black community to the ideology of the 1960s. "The violence and the degradation of the family in the black community is rooted in part in the values and beliefs of the ’60s. We see how the welfare state replaced the father and the effect that’s had on young black males. We see the effects of a feminist ideology that says males aren’t an important facet of families and the consequences for children who are raised without male role models. With abortion, we see the idea that life has little worth. We see black women told that it’s okay to kill their unborn children. Today, that mindset of disrespect for human life is evident in everything from infanticide to gang violence.
"That 1960s mentality is something that white liberal elites brought into the black community," asserts Stallworth. "Those values are damaging, but the elites, with their salaries, can more easily get away with it than can the poor." In The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties Legacy to the Underclass, Myron Magnet makes a similar claim. By pushing no-fault sex, instant gratification, drug decriminalization, and the idea that crime is social protest, by exalting victimhood and suggesting individuals have entitlements to economic sustenance, liberal elites created a cultural revolution whose "most mangled victims" turned out to be members of the underclass.
A few years of this well-intentioned Great Society liberalism delivered a more severe blow to the black family than centuries of discrimination, poverty, slavery, and oppression. "Even during the rigors of slavery, 50 to 60 percent of black slave households consisted of two married parents caring for their own children," says Jacki Cissell, co-founder of Black Americans for Traditional Family Values. "In 1960, 69 percent of black children lived with both parents." Today, only 37 percent do.
"Young black males are dropping like flies," says one of my students, Charles Cranke, describing a shooting at a recent party when he was home in Bowie, Maryland. An 18-year-old black majoring in business management, Cranke says "The reason is that good morals and home training are missing from today’s society. There aren’t enough two-parent families, and the parents that are there aren’t as strict as they should be. My father’s strict, and he’s entrepreneurial. I don’t think his biggest problem is racism; it’s with other blacks who envy his success. What parents should be doing is encouraging their kids about entrepreneurship and business, so they can be successful."
"One way to read the 1960s is to say it was a failed experiment whose price was paid by the Have-Nots," says sociologist Christopher Jencks. For as American Enterprise Institute fellow Irving Kristol puts it, "It’s hard to rise above poverty if society keeps deriding the human qualities that allow you to escape from it."
—Ralph R. Reiland is a professor of economics at Robert Morris College in Pittsburgh.
LOVELESS LIBERATION
That assertive era we call the ’60s pretended to liberate but actually enthralled. Any survey of the period has to begin with its promise of sexual liberation, at once the most and the least successful of its promises.
Sexual liberation was successful in the sense that it was avidly adopted and has had the most consequences of any ’60s revolution. It grossly magnified the importance of sex, treating it as a be-all and end-all, and advanced the notion that all restraint in sex is mere irrational inhibition. Moderation or modesty is neither good in itself nor productive of good by permitting us to pursue higher pleasures than sex. On the contrary, the ideal of sexual liberation makes moderation or modesty seem foolish, prudish, and ridiculous.
Though sexual liberation is now respectable, it has utterly failed to produce better sex or more liberation. It has not brought more pleasure, either bodily or psychic. No new modes or new positions have been discovered, as one can see in the sameness of pornography in the new age and the old. The main difficulty in pornography now is to recreate Victorian conventions so as to have something inhibiting to violate. Since innocence is gone, the only remaining barrier to cross is the consent of the other party, but since both are liberated, why should that be withheld? No wonder freer sex has produced more rape, just as prudes would have predicted. No wonder, too, that it has worked to the advantage of men over women, the less aggressive sex. What sexual liberation has really liberated is the desire for power, not sex.
People who in the 1960s promoted the idea of "polymorphous perversity"—that is, sex uninhibited by any notion of the shameful or of what is fitting—have received a rude shock from the emergence of aids. Perhaps we should listen more carefully to the vague menaces of unenlightened mothers talking about what happens to people who do funny things for sex. Of course this is not the official response to aids, which is confined to sympathy for those affected and large sums for research. Still, the lesson is too obvious to be missed by anyone but a professional in the field.
Since the ’60s, feminine modesty has reasserted itself, though partly in the guise of feminism. There are now plenty of "nice girls," but they are confused, apologetic, and unsupported by social norms. What they get for advice is, "Have safe sex."
Sex without inhibition is loveless as well as shameless, because love is felt as a constraint. Love limits one’s options. Under current rules it is better to harden one’s heart so as to be able to take off when morning comes. What this attitude forgets is that if you desire sex rather than conquest, you can equal the record of Don Giovanni simply by being happily married. And you don’t have to be wealthy or an aristocrat to achieve this. In fact, it helps not to be either.
But Don Giovanni at least sang beautiful songs to deceive his women. With sexual liberation there is no deceit, no seduction, no play, no nuance, no courting, no romance. There may be condoms, if you are lucky.
—Harvey C. Mansfield is Kenan Professor at Harvard and a contributor to Reassessing the Sixties, from which this was adapted.
Free to Abuse
My best friend in the 1960s managed to become a radical overnight. More proof, I see now, that the countercultural appeal was not to reason.
Hers was a really startling transformation that eventually tore us apart. She was beautiful, bright, creative, athletic, funny, a wonderful friend, and full of promise which had begun to blossom in college. We had been close from freshman year in high school, and it was she in fact who had introduced me to William F. Buckley’s National Review and influenced me to join a Young Conservative Club. Then suddenly she was into everything—drugs, sex (with an attendant bout of gonorrhea), a sort of communal living arrangement, demonstrations, open hostility to her parents, nude parties, minor skirmishes with the law, and so forth. Up close I could see that her new life was disheveled and even sordid, but in theory I somehow found it enviable, even romantic. She was breaking all the shackles, she was finding herself, she was free.
Her boyfriend treated her with a jealous, domineering, sexual possessiveness that sometimes tipped over into sadism—another contradiction that I could not quite fathom at the time. None of the non-radical men I knew would have dared to treat a woman that way—putting his hand down her blouse in public to show proof of ownership. We are accustomed to hearing that modern feminism was born when women in the movement woke up to the shock of how conventionally the radical men behaved toward them. But I wonder how much of the impulse toward feminism arose in opposition to masculine brutality specifically unleashed by countercultural dictates that overthrew social norms, including some types of deference to women.
—Carol Iannone, from “The Wide and Crooked Path,” in the book Political Passages.
The Resourceful Jane Fonda
By the end of the 1960s, I realized the Left had caught on and become chic. I got a call early in 1970 from a man in Hollywood who said he represented Jane Fonda. He said that she had broken with former husband Roger Vadim and just completed a session of transcendental meditation with the Maharishi in India. She had read a piece I had written in Ramparts about the Indian occupation of Alcatraz. Because of it she had decided she wanted to come home and "get involved." Would I take her to Alcatraz and introduce her to the Left? Naturally I said yes.
Later she herself called and said that she wanted to meet some Indians. Then she arrived one foggy morning in San Francisco, fresh-looking and self-confident, still in her shag-cut "Klute" phase. She said she’d been in exile for too long, that she wanted to be back in America because this was where it was "happening." I joked that perhaps she had waited too long; the ’60s were over. A look of horror crossed over her face and she said, "Oh, I hope not." I took her to Alcatraz. She was an incredibly quick study, understanding immediately what the power arrangements were on the island, and picking up the radical lingo. She saw, for instance, that there was a factional fight between the Sioux and the other tribes for control of Alcatraz and that the Sioux were more "radical." By the time I left, she was over in their corner of the old prison exercise yard, smoking dope with them.
Later on, as Jane went off on a tour of the reservations I had helped arrange for her, she wrote me a note in a backhanded scrawl expressing her hope that she could be of use in the struggle. It ended with the slogan "power to the people!" Instead of a dot under the exclamation point, there was a little circle. (My wife and I were looking at it later on and she said, "I’m surprised it doesn’t have one of those little smiley faces on it.") The next thing I knew she was on the "Dick Cavett Show" with Mark Lane arguing a Marxist line about Southeast Asia. We were there because our imperialism required the natural resources of the area, especially the "tung and tinsten."
I watched Jane’s rapid progress through "the Movement" over the next couple of years (culminating in her propaganda appearances in Hanoi) with appreciation and also amusement. I always remembered two things: that little circle under the exclamation point, and the classic spoonerism "tung and tinsten."
—Peter Collier, from "Looking Backward: Memories of the ’60s Left," in Political Passages.
Were the ’60s A Fun Decade?
Now that the early baby boomers are turning 50, they are beginning to look back nostalgically at the ’60s, arguing that life has never been more fun than during that decade. New York Times editor James Atlas, for example, laments "the institutionalized hostility to pleasure" in the 1990s, and argues that when he was at Harvard in the 1960s pleasure was the main thing. "Sixty percent of my class smoked marijuana; 16 percent dropped acid. Nearly 30 percent had between 11 and 30 sexual partners.… We marched and demonstrated.… But mostly we had fun."
But why should those activities be considered fun? I would argue that the 1960s were not a fun decade precisely because so much was made of drugs, sex, and radical politics. In pre-pot days, the parties I went to were fun; guys who were witty and told good jokes were popular. There was lots of dancing. When pot became the rage, around the mid-1960s, no one danced anymore, and no one even attempted to be witty or tell jokes. There was mostly silence, as people sat around passing joints while listening to rock music. I smoked pot twice and tried to get into the spirit of the thing, but the solemnity of the ritual always turned me off.
Moreover, the friends of mine who turned to drugs invariably lost their sense of humor. In the late 1960s I had a close friend who was probably the wittiest and smartest person I knew; a religion major at Princeton, he was well-versed in science and literature. In his pre-drug days, when my wife and I spent long weekends with him, his wife, and their young son, we laughed liked crazy doing goofy things, especially playing an odd board game he had invented called Malady, which was as witty and loony as Monty Python. When he started hanging around with rock singers and experimenting with drugs, his sense of humor disappeared. Our friendship became strained because druggies dislike non-druggies; so we spent less time together. One day we learned that he took off for the Southwest, leaving his wife and child in the lurch.
I had a similar experience with another person—a grad school roommate at Rutgers. At first he seemed like a pleasant guy, but he became increasingly dependent upon drugs, doing pot during the week and dropping lsd on weekends at his parents’ apartment. When he returned to school he would give me his lsd-inspired efforts—a stream of semi-conscious writing that was utter nonsense. "You need to be on acid to appreciate it," he said. He eventually stopped taking lsd—or stopped telling me about it—but he was addicted to pot. Once we were late for a concert, but he insisted on stopping by the side of the road and smoking a joint because he appreciated the music more when he was high. Was this fun or was it obsessive behavior?
Was having many sexual partners fun? From all the informal evidence I’ve gleaned over the years, it doesn’t appear to have been fun for many people. My sense is that many young people in the 1960s—especially women—had a lot of affairs to make the quasi-political point that they were liberated. Peer pressure and the fear of being thought repressed drove a lot of behavior. Millions were badly wounded in the process.
Yet nostalgia for the 1960s is likely to grow as boomers move into late middle age. On National Public Radio the other day, I heard a 1960s-worshipping announcer smugly note that a younger friend confessed to him that he wished he’d come of age during that decade instead of the boring 1990s. In ten years many boomers will be insisting to their grandchildren that they were privileged to grow up during the most fun decade of the century. Grandchildren: Don’t you believe it.
—Stephen Miller has written for Commentary, The American Scholar, and The Wilson Quarterly.
HAZED AND CONFUSED
The same week the Marine Corps received the good publicity of having boxer Riddick Bowe enlist, the Corps found itself on the ropes with the media as video tapes surfaced showing Marine parachutists pounding gold wings into the chests of their new comrades.
Today, Bowe is back on the street after just three days of training (which puts his military career somewhere in between former Citadel cadet Shannon Faulkner’s seven days and Bill Clinton’s non-service). Unfortunately for the Marines, while Bowe went home the press did not, and now they have added "hazing" to their list of heinous practices to be rooted out of the backward military culture. Time reporter Elizabeth Gleick, who undoubtedly knows lots about training for warfare, waxed so indignant about the "macho ritual" and its "naked sadism" one would have thought she were describing a Mapplethorpe exhibit.
As the media hand-wringers pilloried the military, they seemed to relish the opportunity to drive spikes of their own into a culture in which very few of them have ever lived. To be fair, the episodes on tape pushed a traditional military practice a bit far. But the sensationalist outrage expressed was greatly out of proportion to the seriousness of the incident. Not surprisingly, the current military leadership responded by raising their skirts and resignedly welcoming the inevitable paddling.
The simple fact is, hazing is one of mankind’s oldest rituals, and not something gratuitous or irrelevant when practiced among soldiers, for whom physical toughness is often a matter of life and death. New lieutenants frequently have shiny gold bars smacked into their shoulders, just as Air Force and Navy aviators have their new wings pinned on. Often—as in my case—it is their own beaming fathers who give them the treatment. (Can I sue Dad for child abuse?)
In every branch of service, enlisted men who become non-commissioned officers traditionally face a gauntlet of their fellow ncos, eager to punch on their new stripes. As an Air Force sergeant once told me, "I didn’t like it a bit—but I’m glad I went through it." When James Webb was Secretary of the Navy, he famously smacked a fourth star onto his Marine commandant, General Al Gray, knocking Gray backwards. "Newbie" Blue Angels, the Navy’s acrobatic flyers, face a light-hearted rite of passage that includes consumption of horrendous mixtures of gruel that would make the option of "blood pinning" seem attractive in comparison. Have any of our investigative journalists ever been on a Navy ship as it crosses the equator? I can hear Katie Couric whining already.
Marine officials described the videotaped events as an aberration. An aberration is a deviation outside the proper or expected course—like, say, the secret use of pyrotechnic devices on a truck to cause its fuel tank to explode, or the deliberate encouragement of unsanitary practices at a food store by reporters creating a news story. But those types of aberrations rarely take on lives of their own in the press the way a good old-fashioned poke at soldiering does.
It’s time for the media to stop looking at the armed forces the way eighteenth-century missionaries looked at pagan cultures. The military has a difficult job to do, and operates under rules far more onerous than most of us have to put up with in our warm and fuzzy civilian worlds. When transgressions occur, the services must be allowed to police themselves under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, rather than being tried by tabloid or talk show decree.
It is also time for the military leadership to stop quaking in their petticoats when the press comes calling. They need only say, "This is an internal disciplinary matter. Thank you for your interest. Good day." If it’s your stars you’re worried about, gents, maybe you should find another career.—Major Bill Buckey is a fighter pilot and combat veteran.
OUR DELICATELY BALANCED PRESS
When describing how Marines banged quarter-inch pins into each others’ chests, the Washington Post spared readers no gory detail. The editors ran a graphic photo, and the accompanying story told how Marines were "violently shoving and rubbing the sharp point of the pins into the flesh of fellow Marines. The T-shirts of the new paratroopers soon became stained with their blood, and some of them collapsed in pain, only to be propped up and abused again." This incident, videotaped 6 years ago, rated front-page coverage.
That very same day, the Post relegated to its Metro section the news that "at least half the state legislatures have bills pending that would ban or restrict" partial-birth abortions. The story had no photo to explain what the fuss is about. The very term "partial-birth abortion" was daintily put in quotation marks as a phrase "abortion rights opponents use." And the
description of this grisly surgery is thoroughly sanitized: "a doctor delivers the body of the fetus, feet first and sometimes still alive, into the birth canal before collapsing the skull so the head can be drawn through the opening of the uterus." No "sharp point" of scissors "shoved" into baby skulls, no suctioning out of brains, and certainly no "blood," "pain," or "abuse" here.
PRESCRIPTION FOR HEALTH CARE
Warning that congressional conservatives are about to be outflanked on health care, publisher Steve Forbes urges the gop to pass measures which would make it easier for employers, unions, and others to offer individual Medical Savings Accounts (msas). He points out that despite suffocating government rules that now discourage msas from taking off in the private insurance market, 3,000 employers plus the United Mine Workers already offer their employees msa opportunities, which have proved popular. Forbes has offered msas to its workers for five years, and "our medical expenses per employee are actually lower than they were in 1990," Forbes reports. Yet "no one has been forced into managed care."
A Glimpse Into Dark Hearts
Editor’s note: The following letter is extremely offensive. Readers who would prefer to avoid graphic and unnatural sexual imagery should skip it. We print this item, with regret, because it addresses an important subject. In much of the discussion of Internet pornography, the problem is but a cool abstraction, and it is easy for opponents of content controls to rail about "puritanical" or "unconstitutional" censoring. This eyewitness account provides another view:
This is Detective Wisher from Florida. I’m e-mailing you a short description of what I have seen tonight. It frankly passes all marks for human perversity, and if you have no desire to glimpse into dark hearts then by all means hit delete.
Our department searched a local house in reference to Internet pornography and found a stack of downloaded photos. I was able to see what is floating around out there. It was a stark reminder of how deeply depraved people can be.
Aside from the standard adult combos and occasional photos of a woman with a dog or steer or elephant (which were no shock to this jaded cop), I viewed horrifying photos of young children engaged in sexual acts. Disgusted, repelled, shocked, frightened—these are not sufficient adjectives to describe my reaction.
Very young girls were touching themselves with an innocent, wanting-to-please look on their faces. Preschool-to-pubescent boys and girls were having sex with each other or adult males. In one photo a little blonde girl of no more than five stood watching a porn film on TV while a male off camera violated her. Many of the photographs were of homosexual couplings involving boys and adult males.
I thumbed through the collection, silently trying to grasp the purpose and demand for such images. Suddenly I stopped on a photo that absolutely turned me pale. It was a photo of an adult male’s penis jammed into the grimacing mouth of a young baby no more than a year or 18 months old. The look on the baby’s face was that of gagging discomfort.
I put the stack of photos down and stared blankly at the far wall, wondering if out there somewhere right now some child is being photographed by some evil man. Standing naked, wondering if she is pleasing this person she trusted. Doing things that somewhere deep inside she knows are wrong—not in the social sense, but in the greater sense of natural laws. I wonder how many buried secrets we police officers never hear about because of shame or fear.
And what is the cost of this vileness? The cost to children’s minds, their visions of themselves, their futures? The costs to adults exposed to this wretchedness? Tonight I have seen something that puts the pornography debate in perspective.
And what do we do about this kind of material? At present, very little. These people, when they are caught, never seem to be dealt with in a way that reflects what they have done. I’m not sure our country is capable of doing what is necessary to a man who would have sex with a year-old baby. We are too soft, too unsure of what is right and wrong any more.
A detective on our force who is an expert on pedophilia explained to me that the Internet has opened up vast new worlds to these men. Individuals with similar preferences can be sought out for reinforcement. Photographs and tips on seduction can be exchanged. This networking provides numerous incitements to action that such persons lacked in years past.
Pedophiles often create collections of hundreds of photographs gathered over years of abusing children. The fixation is so complete they often will not destroy their collections even when the police are investigating them.
I tucked my two-year-old daughter under the covers when I got home tonight. I stood over her watching her sleep peacefully, and wondered about the extent of the judgment awaiting mankind. I actually envisioned an anger that could rain fire down from the heavens.
I count myself lucky every day that I am not asked to interview child molesters and perverts. I lack the detachment needed. I have dark visions of taped transcripts that would end: "So you admit to having sex with little girls and boys, then taking photos for your friends. Okay, bang! This statement is concluded. Somebody call the medical examiner." This stuff depraves everyone who comes in contact with it, including me.
—Raymond Wisher is a police detective working in Florida.
