Short News and Commentary
By Ralph Reiland, Ted Rueter, David C. Stolinsky, Evan Gahr, Kevin Butler, Benjamin J. Stein, Kenneth Lee
"THIS IS FUN"
Bill Clinton’s extramarital shenanigans have never been "private" or "just about sex." From his first days in the governor’s mansion in Little Rock, our ithyphallic President tossed aside claims to privacy when he used state troopers to facilitate his infidelities, bought his conquests’ silence with government jobs, and employed squads of dirt diggers to intimidate his more troublesome companions.
In both the Los Angeles Times and the American Spectator, Arkansas state troopers Roger Perry, L. D. Brown, and Larry Patterson disclosed that Clinton had used them hundreds of times to facilitate his affairs. Yet another state trooper, Danny Ferguson, escorted Paula Jones, then a 24-year-old state employee, to Bill Clinton’s room at the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock on May 8, 1991.
Patterson twice filed complaints—to the captain in charge of Clinton’s security and to the director of the Arkansas state police—about the inappropriateness of chauffeuring Clinton to Gennifer Flowers’ apartment. Other troopers publicly told of Clinton’s offers, after 1992, of federal jobs to buy their silence.
In Blood Sport, Pulitzer Prize-winner James B. Stewart reports that Clinton once confided, "This is fun" to Whitewater partner Susan McDougal, explaining why he loved being governor. "Women are throwing themselves at me. All the while I was growing up, I was the fat boy in the Big Boy jeans."
In 1987, as Clinton was set to announce his candidacy for the presidency, Clinton confidant Betsey Wright insisted on sitting down with him. Wright listed the women Clinton had allegedly had affairs with. "She went over the list twice with Clinton, according to her later account," reports David Maraniss in First in His Class, "the second time trying to determine whether any of the women might tell their stories to the press." Then she suggested he not enter the race. The next day, at a news conference intended to kick off his White House run, Clinton announced he wouldn’t be a candidate.
But four years later, Clinton was back in the race and, within weeks, Betsey Wright and her list were at his side. After Gennifer Flowers publicly acknowledged her affair with Clinton, Wright was persuaded to join the Clinton campaign to prevent, in her words, further "bimbo eruptions."
"You can’t imagine the number of dastardly deeds and undeeds that were conveyed to me on a daily basis," Wright told a congressional hearing. Her task, as described by the Washington Post, was to identify potential accusers in advance and collect information to discredit them. "Women were called and told they’d make them look like whores if they came forward," explains Rex Nelson of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Or worse. Sally Perdue, a former Miss Arkansas, contends a Democratic operative in Illinois warned that her "pretty little legs" might be broken if she continued to speak publicly about Clinton’s dancing around her apartment in one of her nightgowns, playing his saxophone and snorting cocaine. Dolly Kyle Browning says her brother, a Clinton campaign aide, warned her that she would be "destroyed" if she didn’t keep quiet.
And today, after Monica Lewinsky’s reported warning to Linda Tripp that she and her children would be "in danger" if she didn’t testify the right way on the Kathleen Willey episode, the fbi has Tripp sequestered in a "safe house," while Willey, after finding her tires slashed, reports being approached by a stranger who named her children and warned, "I hope you’re getting the message."
The lesson? When it comes to Bill Clinton, there’s nothing new, except that his squalid narcissism and adolescent self-indulgence have moved to a larger stage.
—Ralph R. Reiland is associate
professor of economics at Robert
Morris College in Pittsburgh.
THE BILLY PULPIT
This scene, undoubtedly occurring right now somewhere in America, comes to us from the Internet underground.
DAD: Son, come in here, we need to talk.
SON: What’s up, Dad?
DAD: There’s a scratch down the side of the car. Did you do it?
SON: I believe, if I correctly understand the definition of "scratch the car," that I can say, truthfully, that I didn’t scratch the car.
DAD: Well, it wasn’t there yesterday, and you drove the car last night, and no one else has driven it since. How can you explain the scratch?
SON: Well, as I’ve said before, I have no recollection of scratching the car. While it is true that I did take the car out last night, I did not scratch it.
DAD: But your sister, Monica, told me she saw you back the car against the mailbox at the end of the driveway, heard a loud scraping sound, saw you get out to examine the car, and then drive away. So again I’ll ask you, "yes" or "no," did you scratch the car?
SON: I don’t agree with your contention that you have evidence to prove I scratched the car. You see, I understood you to mean did "I" scratch the car. I stand by my earlier statement, that I did not scratch the car.
DAD: Are you trying to tell me you didn’t drive the car into the mailbox?
SON: Well, you see, sir, I was trying to drive the car into the street. I mishandled the steering of the car, and it resulted in direct contact with the mailbox, though that was clearly not my intent.
DAD: So you did hit the mailbox?
SON: No, sir, that’s not my statement. I’ll refer you back to my original statement that I did not scratch the car.
DAD: But the car did hit the mailbox, and the car did get scratched as a result of this contact?
SON: Well, yes, I suppose you could look at it that way.
DAD: So you lied to me when you said you did not scratch the car?
SON: No. No, that’s not correct. Your question was, Did I scratch the car. From a strict legal definition, as I understood the meaning of that sentence, I did not scratch the car; the mailbox did. I was merely present when the scratching occurred. So my answer of "No" when you asked did I scratch the car was legally correct, although I did not volunteer information.
DISCOUNTS FOR THE WEALTHY
What if businesses and government agencies offered special prices for white people? Or people who wear glasses? Or Southerners? Just prove you’re a member of the privileged group and receive a discount.
Sounds unfair, right? So why does the country put up with discounts for senior citizens—the wealthiest sector of the American public? Currently, the average 70-year-old has 18 percent more spending power than the average 30-year-old. Census Bureau data indicate that median net household wealth for people over 65 is $88,000, while median net household wealth for all ages is only $36,000. A higher percentage of persons over 65 own primary residences, mutual funds, stocks, bonds, retirement accounts, and savings bonds than any other age group. Census Bureau data also show that those 65 years and older have a lower poverty rate than other age groups. If American business wants to assist the disadvantaged, families raising children would be a much more appropriate target.
Many seniors think they’re entitled to discounts, no matter how well-off they are. A reporter for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel quotes a 24-year-old manager: "I’m in the cable business, and these older people in mansions are always asking me, ‘Don’t we get a discount? Don’t we get free cable?’"
Senior citizen discounts were created before the aged won their current privileged attachment to the public purse. They breed resentment among the young. They are probably unconstitutional.
It’s time to retire the senior citizen discount.
—Ted Rueter is the author of
The Politics of Race.
JEWS AND GUNS
New Republic editor Jonathan Cohn recently wrote that he had never touched a gun and never wished to do so. From this one can conclude, among other things, that Cohn never served in the armed forces—and that he never met Sergeant Lee.
I never knew Lee’s first name; to me and the other boys in his high school rotc class, he was "Sergeant." All he revealed of his World War II service was that he was leading an infantry platoon across a field when he was hit by a German bullet.
He had three rows of ribbons across his chest, including the Combat Infantry Badge and the Purple Heart, which I admired because it meant he had shed his blood to defend freedom against the Nazis. As a Jew, this was especially meaningful to me. It was 1949, and the war was fresh in everyone’s memory. Even the rowdiest boys shut up when Sergeant Lee entered the room; we knew to whom we owed our freedom.
Our class was an odd mix of boys considering military careers, misfits who didn’t like physical education, and college-bound kids. I intended to go to Berkeley, which like other state universities required two years of rotc for all male students. If I took three years of high school rotc, I needed only one year in college, leaving more time for pre-med studies.
One day we met on the rifle range. Yes, Washington High School in San Francisco had a rifle range in the basement. Despite this, or perhaps in part because of it, there was not one shooting, stabbing, or serious fight in my years at this middle-class, multi-ethnic public high school. Perhaps the cause of violence is not guns but uncivilized males. Perhaps the reason we felt no need to join gangs, cults, or private militias was that we had been taught we were already members of a special group: Americans.
As the class began, Sergeant Lee discussed firearm safety. In mid-sentence, he picked up the .22 caliber rifle on his desk, pointed it at the wall, and pulled the trigger. There was a deafening bang as the blank went off. When Sergeant Lee told us every gun must be assumed loaded unless we had personally checked it, and that a gun must never be pointed at anything we were not ready to destroy, there was no need for repetition. We had learned gun safety in one vivid lesson.
I recall a mixture of pride and anxiety when Sergeant Lee handed me a .22, the first gun I had ever touched. I was only 14, but I had grown up on war movies, and being handed my first gun had more meaning than my youthful vocabulary could express. It represented entry into manhood quite as much as had my bar mitzvah a year before. By receiving the rifle from Sergeant Lee, as I had by receiving the blessing from my rabbi, I was saying, "Yes, I accept the responsibilities of manhood, knowing that they may be difficult or even dangerous."
My generation, raised on war news and war movies, reached maturity in the 1950s, which were marked by a homicide rate about half the current rate and the lowest suicide rate on record. Could it be that it is not violence that desensitizes us, but meaningless violence? Could images of brave soldiers dying for freedom have a different effect than images of mindless people dying for nothing? Could it be that accepting my first gun from Sergeant Lee, rather than from an older gang member, gave me a different ideal of manhood to strive for?
Mr. Cohn derides the idea that if more European Jews had owned guns, fewer Jews would have died in the Holocaust and more Nazis would have died trying to round them up. I suggest he study the Warsaw ghetto uprising, where a few obsolete guns enabled the Jews to hold at bay for a month at least 3,000 S.S. troops armed with tanks, artillery, and flame throwers, and to inflict on the Nazis more than 100 casualties. I suggest he read Schindler’s List, which notes that Schindler’s bravest action was to steal guns from the Nazis and give them to the Jews.
I suggest Cohn read Targeting Guns by professor Gary Kleck, which documents how over 2 million times a year, Americans use guns to fend off criminal attackers. I suggest he read More Guns, Less Crime by professor John Lott, which documents how states that license law-abiding citizens to carry guns enjoy lower violent-crime rates than other states, with no significant increase in suicides or gun accidents.
Cohn says Aaron Zelman, head of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, is not his kind of Jew. The question is, Which kind of Jew is more likely to assure the continued existence of our people, or of freedom?
—David C. Stolinsky practices
medicine in Los Angeles.
SLAVERY LIVES
As the United States continues to cope with problems growing out of our slaveholding history, it’s sobering to realize slavery is still practiced in the 1990s—in Africa. In the Sudan, a charitable organization called Christian Solidarity International is buying slaves (for a few hundred dollars each) and setting them free. There are reports of slavery in West Africa, too, including in Nigeria and Mauritania (where an estimated 90,000 persons are owned outright, and another 200,000 are indentured servants). Many of these slaves are Christians held in non-Christian lands.
When Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam insisted in a National Press Club speech that slavery did not exist in Africa, the Baltimore Sun sent reporters Gilbert Lethwaite and Gregory Kane on a risky mission to the Sudan, where the reporters purchased two half-brothers, ages 10 and 12, in the village of Manyiel. The reporters paid about $1,000, then delivered the boys back to their father.
The Arab slaver, Adam El Haj, said that the abduction of children into slavery was being organized by the Islamic government in the Sudan. The U.S. State Department and human rights groups estimate there are tens of thousands of other slaves in the Sudan.
THE OTHER DAVID DUKE
He peddles wild conspiracy theories, traffics in raw bigotry, and incites protesters. David Duke? Nope. The Reverend Al Sharpton. The gop, of course, vehemently denounced Duke shortly after the former kkk leader ran for office as a Republican. But as Sharpton increasingly wraps himself in the Democratic mantle, the entire party establishment from President Clinton down welcomes him with open arms.
Last year, Sharpton sought the party’s nomination for New York mayor with virtually no protest from local and national Democrats. And this January, Sharpton even exchanged a warm public hug with President Clinton.
The Democrats’ cozy relationship with Sharpton reveals an unfortunate willingness to countenance bigotry, given that Sharpton has done everything from denouncing Jewish "diamond merchants" to calling a Harlem storeowner "a white interloper" just months before his shop was burned to the ground. Most recently, Sharpton was found guilty of defamation in connection with the infamous Tawana Brawley hoax he rode to fame a decade ago.
In January, during his defamation trial, Sharpton hosted a forum for New York Democratic senatorial candidates at his National Action Network headquarters. Every major Democratic hopeful—Geraldine Ferraro, Representative Charles Schumer, and Mark Green—attended. Very few city power brokers could accomplish that.
Nor were the Democrats embarrassed about attending. "Sharpton’s done some foolish things that are indefensible," Green explained, but "I happen to work well with him." This casual attitude toward a man whose words and deeds should have rendered him a pariah can’t help but embolden him. Once relegated to the fringes of polite society, he’s now emerging as a political player. How long will the Democratic party, through silence and outright collusion, make common cause with Sharpton’s insidious agenda?
—New York City writer Evan Gahr appears
regularly in The American Enterprise.
THE 4 PERCENT SOLUTION
Disturbed that the first class selected without racial preferences contained fewer minority students, the University of California’s Latino Eligibility Task Force released a report exclaiming "Ya basta!" ("enough is enough"). It urged sat scores be eliminated from the admissions process so more Latinos would be accepted. University president Richard Atkinson called the plan "interesting," but support faded after a study revealed that if grades were emphasized more in admissions, only five percent more Latinos and 18 percent fewer blacks would be admitted.
Which doesn’t mean U.C. won’t try to devise other means to dodge Proposition 209, the 1996 referendum prohibiting racial preferences in state college admissions. The latest scheme is the "4 percent plan," which would guarantee admission to the U.C. system to the top 4 percent of students from each California high school, regardless of sat scores. Under the plan, an estimated 700 more blacks and Latinos would be admitted.
The U.C. Regents immediately expressed concern the plan would lower academic standards. "A third of the state’s 858 high schools send few students to the university—and 50 send none," the Los Angeles Times discovered. Requiring that all students graduating in the top 4 percent of their high school automatically be admitted would punish students attending excellent high schools and reward those attending mediocre ones.
Some critics (including Regent David S. Lee) speculated that guaranteed admission would lessen the pressure on high schools to improve student performance. Others (such as Regent Tom Sayles) thought the measure would induce parents to shop for the least competitive high school. Making class rank the determining factor may also discourage students from taking more difficult courses (especially if the Regents approve a proposal to eliminate extra grade points for honors classes).
California’s "4 percent" plan is modeled after a similar one in Texas, where state and university officials have also tried frantically to bypass legal bans on affirmative action. The Texas legislature recently guaranteed state college spots to students in the top 10 percent of their high school class, but results have been disappointing: This year, the first under the 10 percent solution, black and Hispanic enrollment at U.T. Austin, the state’s flagship campus, is up only slightly.
Although U.T. officials insist the quality of the student body will not be diluted, they are now expanding remedial programs for "at-risk" students admitted under the new law. But no one knows if that will be enough. William Forbath and Gerald Torres, two proponents of the 10 percent system at U.T. law school, concede that "many of the students graduating in the top 10 percent of the state’s poorer high schools will prove unready for U.T.," and that remedial programs "may prove insufficient."
The president of U.T. Dallas, who also supports the 10 percent system, likewise confessed "there’s a person who we admitted under the new law that graduated in the top 9 percent of the class, but has a composite sat score of less than 700 [out of 1600]. It’s just not a good situation."
—Kevin Butler is a student
at the University of Texas Austin.
DEAD WHITE MALES
These days, colleges replace "dead white males" with "persons of color" wherever possible in their curricula. But the dead white males retain at least one stronghold: med school labs.
Yes, the old boys’ network is alive and well: Cadavers of color are rare. Perhaps medical schools should implement an immediate affirmative action program to recruit more minority bodies. To further racial justice, candidates might be urged to die as soon as possible. The donors would never suffer the "inferiority worries" said to plague many affirmative action beneficiaries, and of course, the preferences need not entail rigid quotas. Instead, schools should concentrate on outreach efforts and other measures designed to make the labs more inclusive.
As things now stand, snagging one of these plum positions is harder than you may think. State schools use unclaimed bodies, but elite schools generally use donated bodies. At George Washington University medical school in Washington, D.C., potential donors face stiff competition. The school uses just 60 cadavers per year. "We turn away a lot of people. Many more offer than there is space," says anatomy department acting chair Jeffrey Rosenstein.
Dr. Rosenstein says the schools’ cadavers come from all races, but are top heavy with whites. Given that D.C. is overwhelmingly black, gwu would do well to recruit more minorities. Ditto for other schools. Yet many white male doctors adamantly oppose such efforts. In New York City, Adam, a Mount Sinai hospital anesthesiologist who wouldn’t give his last name, says skin color is "irrelevant in medical care. It doesn’t matter if you see a cadaver of color. A cadaver doesn’t talk to you, ask questions, or have needs or wants. One heart looks like another heart."
Expect more such facile evasions as affirmative action takes hold on this new frontier. We can already envision angry white males, worried they’ll lose out to less-qualifed black cadavers, protesting that greater diversity on the marble tables will come "over my dead body."
—Evan Gahr writes regularly for
The American Enterprise. The facts and
quotations in this article are real.
JESSE JACKSON TRIES ON
A FREE-MARKET WIG
"Expansion of the marketplace and inclusion are the keys to economic growth," Jesse Jackson declared with supply-side fervor at Harvard Law School this spring. "When [racial] walls come down, there’s always growth. Let the market flow to the black and brown." The large crowd of corporate lawyers-in-training gave Jackson a standing ovation.
This is the new Jesse Jackson: Gone are the jeremiads against white America. Now he peppers speeches with talk of expanding the market and enlarging the pie, sounding more like Jack Kemp than Al Sharpton.
Jackon’s newfound emphasis on economic growth has earned him plaudits from unlikely quarters. One Wall Street executive told the New York Daily News, "What I found pleasantly surprising is that when we sat down with Jesse Jackson, he was focused on enlightened self-interest." Jackson biographer Marshall Frady gushed, "For a civil rights apostle, he has always tended to be a booming believer in the free enterprise system."
Has Jackson become a free marketeer? Not exactly. He has merely given a more palatable spin to his old liberal economic message, gaining access to Wall Street-types who would have ignored him in the past. During his Harvard lecture Jackson was asked how to help the poor. "Increase the minimum wage." What about the disintegration of the family? "More government spending on child care." What about minorities? "What’s missing from Clinton’s race initiative is money."
Whites prospered, Jackson says, because of a "100-year period of the great give-away" (railroads, Homestead Act lands, and other public goods), which he labels "white affirmative action." Because "white wealth was built by government largesse," it’s only fair blacks should now build wealth through governmental programs. Jackson never explains that most of today’s whites came to America after the distribution of western lands, and that many of them (Jews, Irish, Chinese, etc.) faced discrimination too.
When a black student asked what upper-middle-class blacks should do to help their less well-off brethren, Jackson dismissed his concern as a "diversion": What really matters are things like stopping the mci-WorldCom merger. Saying "religion surpasses all," a black woman asked what role religion should play in the black community. The Reverend answered by dismissing school prayer as a "silly issue," then obliquely defending Clinton: "it’s simplistic to measure character so narrowly" (on adultery only). The young woman, befuddled, just sat down.
She wasn’t the only one puzzled. Harvard had invited grade-school students from inner-city Boston, and by the end of the speech most had become restless and left. Smart kids—while Jackson was lecturing about the market, these black youngsters were selling pens outside the hall to raise funds for their community group. I asked one black girl if she had listened to his speech. "Not really," she replied. I was about to ask why not, but she was too busy working customers to pay attention to me. Maybe hope is still alive.
—Kenneth Lee, a student at Harvard Law School, writes regularly for
The American Enterprise.
ONE BY ONE
When I was growing up in Silver Spring, Maryland, 40 years ago, Iknew racism firsthand. The best neighborhoods in D.C. had restrictions against blacks, Jews, and Asians. So did the best private schools, the best clubs, prestigious law firms and banks. It’s been a long time, but I still feel a powerful twinge when I drive by the Chevy Chase Club. When I was a teenager I wanted to blow the club house up, knowing I would not be allowed to join. Life was far worse for blacks, whose mistreatment was truly miserable.
Time has passed. Racism is still bad, of course, but today there’s a different kind of racism that is supposedly anti-racist, yet still a form of discrimination. In the new racism, certain groups are accorded preferred status, and once again it hurts people. At many schools, non-whites are given preference in admissions, and secret but real preference in grades. Blacks and Hispanics with mediocre records are taken into jobs at firms they could not come near if they were white or Asian. (I see this in my law school teaching, where the only students who receive offers from top law firms are the very best whites or extremely ordinary non-whites.)
This hurts the kids who are rejected. It hurts the clients who receive sub-par service from quota hires. It hurts the people hired, because someone who is patronized knows he’s been patronized.
Then there is another, even uglier form of the New Racism: We are not allowed to tell the truth about race any longer. We cannot talk about the wildly disproportionate incidence of violent crime by non-whites, because that would be racist. If we do talk about it, we have to blame white racism. Kweisi Mfume of the naacp is allowed to complain about how few black law clerks the justices of the Supreme Court have hired—but no one is allowed to give the reason any law teacher knows: A shortage of brilliant black law students. (Ihasten to add that I was not a brilliant law student either.)
The old racist America lived an obvious lie: America was a free society with equal rights for all. In the new racist America, you cannot tell obvious truths: that force-fed racial integration—while a moral imperative—helped to kill the public schools in large parts of America (spurring a new segregation); that, so far, not all racial groups are contributing equally to the good things and bad things in American life. In the old racist America, non-whites could not get service jobs interacting with the public as, say, airline reservationists. In the new racist America, you cannot tell the truth that many whites avoid dealing with a black woman who answers the phone at an airline because they fear incompetence.
But it’s complicated. Despite being horribly mistreated in America for centuries, many blacks serve their country handsomely today, better than some whites born to great privilege. But does patronizing blacks as a group help any individual? Do official preferences account for today’s many black success stories, or is it individual effort? Can government controls fix the problems of race? Or is the best strategy the one followed by Jews and Koreans and Chinese and Vietnamese: scrimping, working, saving, studying, one by one? If that’s not the way for non-whites to move ahead today, what is? How can the lives of non-whites be improved without sacrificing the rights of others or truth? It’s the most morally vital issue of our time.
—Ben Stein is a writer, actor,
and lawyer in Los Angeles.
MARCHING FOR LITERACY
Civil rights hero James Meredith is still marching—but now he’s headed for the library. As a young Korean War vet, Meredith made history in 1962 when he defied white mobs to become the University of Mississippi’s first black student. Today, Meredith, 65, has a new crusade: teaching blacks proper English. Illiteracy, he contends, is the chief obstacle to black progress. Unless blacks can master the English language, "we’re not going to solve the problem of the black race and education."
In the last two years, he has led marches in towns all over Mississippi to promote proper English. Typically, he begins at City Hall and ends at the library, a location that too few blacks know, he laments.
In order to make the black male "as comfortable in the library as he is on the basketball court" Meredith holds weekend seminars at a local Jackson, Mississippi church. There he teaches black males—ages 8 to 80—how to read and write. "How they going to do anything if they don’t read? I tell them to become intellectual giants; if they learn the rules, then they can become an intellectual giant."
The literacy crusade confirms Meredith’s penchant for self-sufficiency. In his view, society’s once-noble goal of full black participation has given way to a "dependency mentality"—fostered by black and white liberals who use government handouts to increase their own power.
No wonder he doesn’t want taxpayer dollars for his current effort. But suppose folks who take his class can’t afford the required textbooks? "With $150 gym shoes on? What are you taking about?." He cites an elderly man who walked three miles to the seminar. "He ain’t got a car but paid his money to get the book."
Meredith emphasizes only reading and writing proper English. He says that if blacks talk jive that isn’t necessarily a problem; Henry Kissinger never suffered for his thick German accent.
Sadly, academic success is considered "white" among many blacks. To that end, Meredith tells blacks to think of proper English as a "foreign language." He explains that when Vietnamese immigrants learn English and get good jobs, "they’re not trying to be white; they’re trying to become competitive." His students quickly get the point, he says.
Improving Mississippi’s position at the bottom of the U.S. literacy charts is a daunting challenge. Nevertheless, Meredith, a gruff but unassuming man known for having quirky views on a number of subjects, hardly seems worried. After all, quite some time ago he showed the nation that one man can make a world of a difference.
THE NORTH ATLANTIC UNION
Britain has long been more closely attached to the U.S. than to its continental European brethren. Now Britain’s influential Daily Telegraph has taken to arguing that the U.K. should formalize those loyalties. Instead of melding further into the increasingly statist European Union (E.U.), Britain should seek membership in nafta, the U.S./Canada/Mexico free trading pact that is already negotiating outward links with South American and Scandinavian countries.
Margaret Thatcher and several prominent Tories have signed on to this effort. Speaker Newt Gingrich has given the idea his blessing, and Senator Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) has introduced a bill that would make Britain an associate member of nafta. Other newspapers are climbing on board, with the populist London Sun urging British Prime Minister Tony Blair to "Look west young man."
British Europhiles protest that joining nafta would force Britain to kowtow to America, but the Telegraph dismisses as "preposterous" the claim that nafta "could pose more of a threat to its members’ sovereignty than the E.U." As for the possibility that Europeans might retaliate against such a move by the British, the Telegraph points out that "British exports to the U.S. are rising, while exports to Europe are falling."
The case for a British turn toward America, the paper concludes, "does not simply rest on affinity of language, culture, or political values. It is based on hard economic calculation."
THANK YOU FOR NOT VOTING!
"How many stripes would the American flag have if we removed a stripe for every half-million people who don’t vote?" That’s the first line in a public service announcement by the Ad Council that sets my teeth on edge. By the time the spot ends, we’ve lost all of our stripes and stars and are left waving nothing but a white flag.
Myself, I’m all in favor of apathy. If I were writing public service announcements, I would urge more voters to stay home.
Recently, over 20 percent of the voters in the Democratic senatorial primary in Oklahoma voted for a candidate who had been dead for several weeks. Giving Oklahoma voters the benefit of the doubt, perhaps this was a call for limited government. But in a Democratic primary? No, I’m afraid the only explanation is ignorance. If there were any justice in this world, those voters would never be allowed to vote again.
The latest move toward widening the franchise is voter registration at driver’s license bureaus. This is the height of foolishness. The people who drive on the roads with you every day already threaten you each time you start your car, and now we’re encouraging them to vote! The last time I renewed my license, the conversation between the clerk and the fellow in front of me went something like this: "Are you registered to vote?" "I don’t know." "Would you like me to register you?" "I guess." Next thing you know, we’ll be sending him a postcard ballot already filled out, with a line for him to mark X by his name.
If we think elections are less meaningful because less than half the population bothers to vote, why have elections at all? Why not just have a national polling day, call up 1,200 people, and get a true picture of the mood of the populace. Think how much money would be saved!
Recently, pollsters have found that more teens can name the Three Stooges than the three branches of government, that far more can identify Leonardo DiCaprio than Al Gore, and that 37 percent of the public believe in astrology. Do we really want people who spend their hard-earned money calling the psychic hot line to decide our nation’s future?
Voting should not be made easier. As the only sacrament in our public life, ceremony should be involved. I well remember my father taking me to the county clerk’s office in August 1976, to vote absentee before I left for college. I met the clerk, filled out the required paperwork, and voted in the room where the local county governing board met each week. The huge room and the solemnity of signing my name and having my signature notarized impressed upon me the gravity of my vote. I had studied the ballot, read about the issues, and took the whole exercise very seriously.
Sadly, this first experience prepared me for a lifetime of being out of sync with the rest of the public—everybody I voted for lost, including the congressional candidate who campaigned as a bachelor until his wife showed up a week before the election.
There are a few sure ways to increase voter turnout: Have a good old-fashioned fight on the school board. Let the assessor increase property values. But absent local acrimony, war, or depression, voter turnout will continue to decline. Voters have decided our national government is too large and too far removed from their daily concerns for their votes to make a difference. I think they’re right.
So stay home in November. Ignore the Ad Council. And let me vote in peace.
—Blake Hurst votes in
Tarkio, Missouri.
THE SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE MYTH
Today’s fanatical advocates of "separation of church and state" insist it poses a mortal danger to America when rabbis or ministers are allowed to pronounce invocations at graduation ceremonies, or when engravings of the Ten Commandments are left on courthouse walls. With a hailstorm of lawsuits they have imposed this view on the nation.
Their hero is Thomas Jefferson, who coined the phrase "a wall of separation between church and State" (in one of his letters; nothing like it appears in the Constitution). So it is interesting to observe what Jefferson himself thought the proper balance was between civil and religious life, as shown in a major exhibit mounted by the Library of Congress, "Religion and the Founding of the American Republic."
The exhibit notes that President Jefferson attended church every Sunday—in the House of Representatives. The Capitol was actually used by several congregations as their sanctuary. So were the Treasury department and the War Office, with Jefferson’s blessing. Jefferson also allowed the Marine band to play at these religious services. He even put a clergyman on the government payroll so that he would have the support necessary to continue his ministry. For many years, church services were also held every Sunday in the Supreme Court chamber, with at least one justice always present.
The Library of Congress’s curator, James Hutson, writes, "It is no exaggeration to say that, on Sundays in Washington during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, the state became the church." Such practices continued through much of the nineteenth century. Hutson records the delicious irony that on precisely the day—May 13, 1866—when Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment (its "equal protection" provisions are one of the favorite clubs wielded against public religious expression), the newly organized First Congregational Church of Washington was permitted by the House to use the House chamber for services and Sunday school.
The laws now interpreted as forbidding any acknowledgment of religion in public life meant no such thing to the Founders who wrote them. If we will just demand a little moderation and tolerance from absolutist opponents of worship, religion and public life can once again co-exist in a comfortable, natural way—as they did for the most famous author of America’s liberties.
