New Jersey schoolchildren have been protected from contact with the evil words of a hate-filled document—the Declaration of Independence.

The state legislature was on the verge of passing a bill this winter requiring public school students to recite the “We hold these truths…” paragraph of the Declaration each day. The bill also mandated that students be taught about the less-than-perfect state of equality that existed when the Declaration was written. But that didn’t prevent opponents from leaping to block the measure.

In a speech the Philadelphia Inquirer described as “fiery,” State Senator Wayne Bryant (D-Camden), “thundered” that the Declaration’s talk of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness “was an affront to his slave ancestors. He pleaded with his colleagues not to divide New Jersey’s classrooms by forcing students to relive slavery.”

“I would never allow my grandchildren to stand in class and repeat these words,” he insisted. “It’s another way of being exclusionary, unfeeling, insensitive to a large majority of the population.”

And so Democrats killed the bill.

So don’t expect many young New Jerseyites to pledge their lives, fortunes, and sacred honors the next time certain unalienable rights are threatened. 

American Caesarism in Bangladesh

We’ve complained repeatedly about the imperial trappings accumulating around the presidency during the Clinton administration (see TAE March 2000 page 8, and March/April 1999, page 10). The latest evidence came in President Clinton’s March trip to India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

The Air Force estimates that when the totals are in some months from now, the flight costs alone of the President’s “protected sightseeing” (as ABC News characterized the trip) across the Asian subcontinent will come to $50-75 million.

It’s not easy to imagine how someone could blow that much on one trip, until you realized that the Presidential entourage included nearly 80 aircraft, including 26 huge C-5 and C-17 cargo planes.

We’d be happy to pay for 100 Secret Service men and some foreign policy advisors on one plane and the President and his family and staffers on Air Force One. But 80 aircraft, a mobile news spin factory, and up to $75 million for one jaunt stinks of Caesarism to us.

And we suspect that to many citizens of other lands, where $50-75 million could keep entire cities of families alive for a full year, that sort of obscene imperial pampering of our chief executive must look like ugly Americanism. 

Japan’s Mess of Government Spending

Since Japan’s collapse in 1990, there have been ten “stimulus” packages sponsored by Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party, totaling nearly $1 trillion. This gush of government spending has been followed by repeated disappointments and a resumption of negative growth, with disastrous consequences for Japanese households and businesses. Their losses have totaled over $15 trillion. The Japanese economy went back into recession at the end of 1999, with annualized growth rates of negative 3.9 percent in the third quarter and negative 5.5 percent for the fourth quarter.

Public finances have reached the danger point. Japanese government debt now totals over $6 trillion, and during the fiscal year beginning this April new government borrowing will increase that by an additional $450 billion. That is comparable to a U.S. budget deficit of $900 billion in one year—over three times worse than anything we experienced in our very worst deficit years.

—adapted from the American Enterprise Institute Economic Outlook by John Makin, April 2000  

WhO’s irresponsible?

The Tax Foundation has just calculated that under the tax reform plan proposed by Governor George W. Bush, Bush’s own federal income taxes would be cut by $32,872. (Needless to say, Bush pays a lot to the feds—a total of more than $3.8 million in 1998, the latest year available.)

Under the plan proposed by Vice President Gore, meanwhile, Bush’s personal taxes would be trimmed by $45,264. So much for the Vice President’s claim that the Bush tax cut would be “irresponsible” and give away too much to wealthy people like the Texas governor.  

No, We are not making this up

Harper’s, established in 1850, is one of America’s most established literary institutions. In March it printed a major article, complete with footnotes and lewd photo, about, well, testicle art. The article profiles one Matthew Barney, referred to by the Harper’s editor who wrote the piece as a “genius”—a characterization many others in the modern art world apparently agree with, given that Barney has been called “the most crucial artist of his generation” by the New York Times and awarded the prestigious Hugo Boss Prize of the Guggenheim Museum.

We don’t trust ourselves to paraphrase the Harper’s story in all its earnestness; so we’ll just quote it:

“Matthew Barney is the Michelangelo of genital art, the supreme master of the genre, whose work so transcends the run-of-the-mill video artist masturbating in his studio that he also may be said to bring his tradition to its unsurpassable realization…. The great challenge facing each genital artist is one of visual discrimination…. After viewing a few thousand photographs or videos featuring genitalia (and their excrementa) in various poses and states of mutilation…it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish among the works of different artists…. Barney’s work, as it sets about redeeming genital art, also moves beyond it, revealing it to be a style of world-historical significance….

“His first major piece, Field Dressing, revealed the naked young Yale graduate sliding up and down a metal pole, carefully and repeatedly applying cooled Vaseline to all his orifices….

“[In] his next major work, Blind Perineum…the artist used mountain-climbing gear to clamber about naked on the walls and ceiling of the Barbara Gladstone Gallery. Still, the public and critical establishment seemed resistant to the power of the work…. Barney replied with Radical Drill, in which he performed football blocking exercises wearing a black evening gown and high-heeled shoes…. Drawing Restraint 7, which appeared a few years later in the 1993 Whitney Biennial, featured Barney costumed as a goat-boy named Kid, along with a couple of satyrs who spend much of the video wrestling in the back of a limo, repeatedly penetrating Manhattan via the island’s tunnels and bridges….

“[Barney] is not burdened with a fashionable concern for ‘the other.’ What distinguishes Barney’s Onanism from other varieties of genital art is its persistent self-regard; Onanism is all about the self, Barney’s self.”

To which we add—You can say that again. Rubes that we are, we read this article twice and then did independent research to convince ourselves this wasn’t an April Fool’s parody of modern art critics.

Sorry, folks. We must report that Matthew Barney and his fabulous testicle art are real, and winning prizes, and inspiring reveries in our oldest intellectual magazines.

“Onanism may be the only original and vital artistic movement in the world today,” the Harper’s article concludes in its final sentence. Given the extreme aridity of modern art, there may be a certain truth to that.  

Hurray for impunity  
From the latest edition of Propositions, by David Blankenhorn:

For people who worry about marriage as a social institution, simply paying attention can now be disconcerting. Here are two examples.

• In Mississippi, the heart of the Bible Belt, Governor Kirk Fordice, age 65, announces his decision to seek a divorce from Pat, his wife of many years. Pat is not amused. About that time, the governor begins taking trips to France and to Gulf Shores, Alabama, with his former sweetheart from his junior high school days in Memphis, Tennessee. These facts get reported in the media. Fordice is livid. He announces that he considered resigning “just to keep from going through this [publicity] in trying to have a transition from one marriage into another, which is done all the time with complete impunity and no publicity.” Fordice is correct. This is done all the time with complete impunity.

• Wendy Wasserstein, the Pulitzer-prize winning playwright, had a baby girl, Lucy, on September 12, 1999. And, according to the New York Times, “what a production it was!” Meryl Streep dropped by the hospital to see the baby. An important costume designer decorated the hospital room. Lots of impressive theater people came to visit. “If you haven’t won a Tony, can you go?” quipped a well-known set designer. The baby’s father “was not announced,” according to the Times. Ms. Wasserstein, it turns out, had decided “to have the baby alone.” The Times continues, “Still, there are a large number of men, gay and straight, whom Ms. Wasserstein regards as ‘husbands.’ They include [a number of impressive theater people]. She knew that no child of hers would lack for ‘fathers.’”  

AGENDAS IN JOURNALISM

The April release of a Freedom Forum complaint that “the overall percentage of journalists of color in newsrooms increased by just 1.2 percentage points between 1994 and 1999,” inspired this misty daydream in Indiana University journalism professor Steve Salerno:

BLOOMINGTON, Indiana, April 2000—The highly regarded School of Journalism and the legendary basketball program of Indiana University today announced a cooperative venture designed to eradicate historical patterns of race bias in their respective realms. Starting immediately, all of the school’s black basketball players must begin preparing instead for careers in journalism, and all white journalism students must prepare for careers in the NBA. The move comes on the heels of a complaint by the Freedom Forum that even though the percentage of blacks in journalism has tripled since 1978, too few minorities now work in journalism.

Noting that the study found many minority journalists choose to leave their jobs after short periods of employment, the university will require all black students to pledge that they will not leave a newsroom job under any circumstance. Asked whether the new policy bears an uncomfortable resemblance to slavery, a spokesperson replied, “We don’t care. It’s essential to have the black agenda reflected in daily journalism.”

The spokesperson seemed annoyed when reminded that most minority journalists in the Forum study reported healthy relationships with their supervisors and “good” or “excellent” advancement opportunities. “You’re focusing on the positive,” he snapped. “That’s not the way we do things in this country.” He added, “We have to keep doggedly cataloguing these racial numbers, otherwise we’ll never reach true colorblindness.”

Similarly, the National Organization for Women dismissed the study’s little-mentioned finding that neither racial nor gender bias appear to play a role in newsroom assignments. A NOW press release observed that the organization endorses “only those statistics that support our cause.”

Reached for comment, Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight applauded the university’s initiative, noting that most journalism students are shorter and thus “easier to choke.” (He then accidentally smashed the interviewer.)

The university’s decision may spark a trend. Purdue announced it is considering a partnership between its famous school of engineering and the locally based Eli Lilly Company, makers of Prozac—the hope being to introduce more women to engineering and more men to depression. And New York’s New School for Social Research is said to be brainstorming for ways to have greater numbers of women convicted in capital-murder cases, thereby reducing the male-female disparity on death row.  

As he searches for some way to start a prairie fire across America, Governor George W. Bush ought to consider a new way of selling himself: as the unlawyer.

America’s disdain for lawyers is palpable. They’re even more unpopular than the press. And rarely has the record of the profession America loves to hate ever been so dirty.

The only two lawyers elected to the Presidency since the 1930s were Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. Does America need another law school seatwarmer in Al Gore?

The Clinton-Gore White House is packed full of lawyers, more than have worked in any previous administration. Some of the results? Just after a federal court rules against him, the most powerful attorney in America says his administration was simply following the “rule of law” when it sent federal agents brandishing automatic weapons to break down the door of a Miami family.

That same attorney-in-chief spends much of his administration throwing lawyerly obstructions at other federal and state courts. And when members of a federal grand jury ask about the truthfulness of his testimony, he tells them It depends on what the meaning of “is” is.

Vanderbilt Law School attendee Al Gore, caught violating the law prohibiting campaign fundraising on federal property, argues there’s “no controlling legal authority” that says he couldn’t do it.

Then there’s the ocean of sharks in private legal practice, filing new lawsuits at rates two and a half times faster than the growth of the nation’s population. Half of all high-tech companies have now been sued, convenient deep pockets that they are. And the costs of our tort system exceed $150 billion.

No less an authority than Erin Brokovich illustrates why a populist movement for legal reform is possible: “I hate lawyers,” she says in her movie, “I just work for ’em.”

Even when unpopular targets like breast implant manufacturers are involved, there are signs of a backlash against today’s legal bandits. One notorious barrister, John O’Quinn of Texas, is now being sued by some of his former clients, who complain he swindled them out of their settlement money. In fact, over half of the dollars collected by our tort system are being kept by lawyers and the system itself, rather than the people claiming injury.

This judicial game has done more than just enrich lawyers or cost Americans piles of money. Makers of medical devices, for instance, are now more reluctant to produce innovative products for fear of being sued. Women’s health pioneer Dr. Elizabeth Connell, who chaired the Food and Drug Administration hearings on implants, told TAE’ that lawyers’ institutionalization of junk science has “proved to be among the most contentious, costly, and dangerous events to occur in women’s health care.”

It’s time to make runaway lawyers a part of our national debate.

TOUGHENING UP ON CAMPUS 

Reform-minded governors in several states have begun to make their state colleges a bit more rigorous and a bit less politically correct. In one of the more encouraging shifts, the trustees of the State University of New York system (SUNY) voted to require a core curriculum in all of the state’s 17 four-year colleges.

Beginning with the Class of ’04, students will have to pass ten courses, including at least one each in American history, Western civilization, and math, as well as courses in natural science, non-Western civilization, and foreign languages.

Some liberal faculty complained the requirements were too “mainstream.” “This is probably the best idea of 1955,” sniffed professor Vincent Aceto. But SUNY Trustee Candace de Russy noted that “the public is increasingly aware of the knowledge deficit on the part of our college graduates,” and described this action by board members appointed by Republican Governor George Pataki as an attempt to begin remedying that. “I fully expect SUNY’s action will increase the pressure to raise general-education standards in other states,” responded Tom Carroll, chairman of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education.

Simultaneously, a majority of the trustees of the City University of New York (the New York City college system) have now been appointed by Governor Pataki and New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and they too are raising standards to end the decades-long decline of that university. Their first step—met with vociferous opposition from faculty and students—was to end remedial education in the system’s ten four-year colleges. More efforts to spur excellence in education are planned.

—Michael Capel is a recent graduate of Cornell University.

THE NEW FACE OF COLLEGE CHRISTIANITY

You probably knew Asians are disproportionately enrolled in the nation’s top universities. But did you know they also stand out in the Christian organizations at those same schools? Although Asians number fewer than 4 percent of the U.S. population and around 15 percent of the student body at top colleges, many of the Christian clubs at places like Berkeley and Yale are now majority Asian.

And these aren’t small, marginal groups. They’re typically larger than any other single student group. “Asian-dominated Christian fellowships” regularly attract hundreds of students at Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Chicago, reports David Cho of the Philadelphia Inquirer. At Columbia, Cho notes, 20 players clash weekly in the chess club, and about 40 College Republicans meet twice a month, but “every Thursday, up to 110 students, nearly all Asians, gather at the school’s Campus Crusade for Christ,” the largest of Columbia’s 17 official Christian groups.

InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, a national evangelical group, counts 650 chapters across the country. Its Asian-American enrollments grew by 267 percent in the last 15 years, and by 605 percent at New York and New Jersey colleges. Some all-Asian Christian organizations have grown even faster.

 “The professional world will soon experience an influx of highly educated Asian students,” Cho summarizes, “who have conservative political leanings and would support burgeoning evangelical movements.”  

Clinton’s Police State

The Clinton administration doesn’t understand the differing responsibilities held by different levels of American government. Untroubled by Washington bloat, the administration has, for instance, increasingly tried to assert federal control over local schools. Worse, the Clintonites have promoted a kind of liberal police state through a creeping federalization of criminal law.

The President’s most repeated proposal for his final year in office (mentioned in no fewer than 130 presidential speeches and papers) is to corrupt the federal criminal code by providing special interest groups with their own “hate crimes” categories. The administration would grant special status in federal civil rights law to “sexual orientation,” “gender,” and “disability.” This would, to put it mildly, introduce a certain vagueness into law. Clinton himself has admitted there will be “a lot of questions about whether or not rape is motivated by hate or not.”

Clinton and Gore have already created several dozen new federal capital offenses in other areas; new “hate crimes” laws would do more of the same. Such proposals make for happy audiences at gatherings like the Democratic National Committee Gay and Lesbian Luncheon, the Congressional Black Caucus, Anti-Defamation League conventions, and the DNC Hispanic Dinner. But the costs of this posturing may be high. The degree of punishment for an assault, theft, or murder would be based, not on the evil of the crime, but on the race, religion, or sexual practices of the victim, or the politics (however noxious) of the perpetrator. In addition, such laws would make bad intent (which is always subjective) sharply magnify the significance of less heinous acts.

Federal prosecutions—with their overwhelming powers and stiff penalties—should be remedies of last, not first, resort. Recently, we’ve been doing the reverse, shredding concepts of double jeopardy and making agencies like the FBI and federal judiciary ever larger and more imperious.

A “shapeless and all-embracing statute can serve as a dangerous instrument of political intimidation and coercion,” noted a Supreme Court opinion penned right after the Nuremburg trials. Often this happens in two stages. “Evil men are rarely given power; they take it over from better men to whom it had been entrusted,” the Justices observed.

President Clinton’s proposals would allow federal prosecutions even if acts of violence did not break federal statutes. This could allow federal prosecutions for almost any crime, giving federal authorities a whip hand over state and local law enforcement. Keep in mind that state and local prosecutors are elected for fixed terms and not readily controlled by politicians, while federal law enforcement is highly centralized and easily politicized. All federal prosecutors serve at the pleasure of the President, as was made clear at the start of Clinton’s term when he made an unprecedented clean sweep of all of them nationwide.

Why is new “hate crimes” legislation necessary? The ugly crimes in Texas and Wyoming that the President repeatedly cites were fully and (by international standards) harshly punished by the state courts. No victim group was slighted in the responses by state authorities. The shameless Clinton-Gore lamentations cannot obscure the fact that no state today takes such killings lightly.

We know Mr. Clinton is not a mature or serious man. Let him play with his usual political toys over the next year, but not with our federal criminal code. The dangers are too great.

—Baltimore lawyer George Liebmann is a TAE contributing writer.