Can the disease be cured?

Nicholas von Hoffman

Washington

. . . We got reports from down here that people were doing 'stupid sensual things', were in a state of 'uncontrollable frenzy', were wriggling like fish, doing something called the 'Eagle Rock' and the 'Sassy Bump', were cutting a mean 'mooche' ... We knew that something was `jes grewing', like the 1890s flares-up.

The Mayor feels that uncomfortable sensation at the nape of the neck and soon he is doing something resembling the symptoms of Jes Grew and the doctor who rushes to his aid starts slipp- ing, dipping, gliding on out of doors into the streets. Shades of windows fly up. Lights flick on in the building ... By morning there are 10,000 cases of Jes Grew ... Jes Grew infects all that it touches ... but if the Jes Grew which shot up a trial balloon in the 1890s was then endemic, it is now epidemic, crossing state lines and heading for Chicago.

— From Mumbo Jumbo, a novel by Ishmael Reed.

Jes Grew made it to Chicago and turned pandemic in the early Seventies. The hidden hedonisms, formerly practised by the degenerate fraction of the very wealthy, penetrated the white and blue collar masses. Sex, drugs, music, self-absorption and self- veneration worked their way into the hard rock personality formation of sacrifice, labour, self-discipline, self-deprivation. Whatever happened — and we do not yet know with any clarity — is blamed on the pill, on the sexual revolution, on per- missiveness, on any number of things which cannot reasonably account for what, to an older generation, is assuredly a world turn- ed upside down with the formerly stout sons and daughters of sober factory workers taking drugs and attempting the lascivious life, while tens of thousands of unabashed homosexuals raise hitherto un-

seen banners and march up the boulevards of the nation's major cities.

As with other epidemics many were im- mune to Jes Grew. Some were like Alfred Bloomingdale, the multimillionaire friend of the Reagans who died recently, after which it came to light that, in addition to enjoying tennis and gin rummy, he also lik- ed to whip named young women. But men like Bloomingdale kept their love of such indoor sports secret. Jes Grew is shameless, it proclaims itself, is proud of itself and, be- ing in the open, can be attacked in the open.

From its inception a large number of ministers of religion and university pro- fessors preached against the 'new bar- barism' of Jes Grew. At first they sounded like old cranks to Beatles fans and the well intentioned who had grown up schooled in hostility towards anything called repressive or elitist. The egalitarianism of the un- dulating hip was on us and there were preachers aplenty to propound that Jes Grew, far from being a disease, was an ideal condition, one highly conducive to the self- realisation and self-expression which, it was averred, are our right by virtue of common

'I'm not a cuckoo' I'm a London pigeon looking for a weekend place.' humanity. Of late, however, those who . have opposed Jes Grew sound less quaint, less out of it, less like voices of an ir- retrievably lost past. The sexual counter- revolution is under way: people who evince no interest in reinstituting prayer in the public schools, an issue of no small impor- tance to millions, have found secular motivations to search for a cure or, better, a vaccine against Jes Grew.

Academic folk are beginning to chum out research showing that children who screw around or, as the idiom goes,

become 'sexually active' in their early teens do less well in school. The single-parent child, investigators are saying, is more vulnerable to a variety of behavioural pro- blems. Since a quarter or perhaps more of all the children in the United States live in one-parent families, they are saying, in effect, that a large part of the population Is in danger of foundering.

Research of this kind is generally a guess to validate a foregone conclusion so that the existence of all this social science talk is more important than its content. Like the herpes scares, or the furore over AIDS, the rare diseases, the motives of the people making much of the noise are Regardless of religious conviction or the lack thereof, Jes Grew is socially degenerative and must be stamped out in all its manifestations.

ne of the manifestations which is get- ting a lot of attention just now is the schools and how little learning takes place inside them. The National Commission on Excellence in Education has come out with a report saying that things are so bad that 'America is at risk ... some 23 million Americans are functionally illiterate by the simplest tests of everyday reading, writing and comprehension ... secondary school curricula have been homogenised, diluted and diffused to the point that they no longer have a central purpose. We have a cafeteria-style curriculum in which the appetisers and desserts can easily be mistaken for the main courses. Students have migrated from vocational and college Preparatory programmes to "general track" courses in large numbers. (FortP two per cent of all high school students are in the general track.) ... Twenty-five Per cent of the credits earned by general track high school students are in physical and

tudents

health education, work experience, outside school, remedial English and mathematics and personal service and development courses such as training for adulthood and marriage.' In one way or another the slow, sad

decline of the schools into perpetual .

ranee is blamed on Jes Grew or the spirit of Jes Grew. Such attributions are made the more easily because of the white Americans assumption that hedonism is black Africa fatal gift to us. Jes Grew started in the Con: go and came here to infect our blond and blue-eyed children.

as much with those who administer however, lie The roots of Jes Grew, the nation's youth. You are asking for trouble when you build high schools with four or five thousand students, which has been the practice in the United States for a generation or more. Short of remov- ing them from their homes altogether it would be hard to think of a better way of snatching adolescents from control and supervision and guidance than in building such institutions.

But isolating them from other influences makes high school kids that much more vulnerable, not only to the sales pitches directed to them, but the Jes Grew values implicit in the mass marketing aimed at adolescents. Many billions of dollars are to be made in clothes, records, movies, cosmetics, motorcycles, soft drinks and so forth. Several thousand radio stations have programmes only for teenagers and on television certain periods of the programme week are given over to this audience. All the considerable artifice of Madison Avenue is used to inculcate the primacy of the pleasure principle and, need it be said, sex and physical beauty are used to sell every category of merchandise. The spirit of Jes Grew didn't Jes Grew, yet some of the business executives who make their livings off it lend their names in the fight against the disease.

In a society whose most important social thinkers reiterate that there is no work and will be no work for a considerable part of the adult population, some people's work will have to be pleasure. The Jes Grew bacterium must flourish among people who have grown up hearing they are superfluous or only marginally needed. To try to instill the work ethic in people whose labour is not wanted is a trifle perverse. One wonders if it is possible, and if it is possible whether it may not be dangerous. If a generation of workers are reared for whom there is no work, their presence may be seriously destabilising, as they say at the Department of State. Those infected by Jes Grew are not likely to take to the hills and aim pot shots at postmen.

The men and women in white smocks, who dedicate their lives to the fight against Jes Grew, such as Mr and Mrs Ronald Reagan, do not see the plague as self- limited. They believe it will devour all unless it is devoured. They are using every tool they can think of to stop Jes Grew: for instance, they are pushing a new ad- ministrative rule which requires medical personnel to tell a teenager's parents when she is given a contraceptive aid. Those who do battle against Jes Grew are obsessed by an analogy with the Roman Empire; the decline and fall thereof is a phrase which comes often to their lips. As they see it, once a society has fallen prey to Jes Grew the course of the disease is irrever- sible, so that any means are justified in the struggle to preserve our pristine, puritan vigour. Perhaps the dear English people could tell them that the revels of the Restoration were, in the evolution of things, replaced by the virtues of Vic- torianism.