Embarrassment of riches
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington After entertaining the prime minister of Japan and the prime minister of Israel, who seems to spend more time here than in his own capital, President Carter took wing for Colorado where he marked the observance of something called Sun Day. While native dancers arose to greet the rosy-fingered dawn with rites choreographed by public relations men, the chief executive announced that the age of Aquarius had been cancelled and that henceforth, we should worship the sun god Ra, the source of all life and the hope of energy independence.
Solar energy or just plain solar, as we're learning to call it, has been getting a propaganda blitz by those who believe that the amount the government is spending on research for its application is far too small. The President may be pushing this still very exotic technology because he knows no one will hold him to any promises he makes on its behalf. With his poor showing in the public opinion polls continuing, it gives him a chance to look dynamic and it is the new, swashbuckling Carter we were supposed to see on this western trip which found him all the way out in the Pacific northwest saying uncomplimentary things about the high prices doctors charge, and the obstacles to justice thrown up by the legal profession.
The standing of the learned professions
hasn't been enhanced by the increasing publicity given to the practice of rich parents buying their children places in medical school. The New York Times recently reported on the case of William Hornstein, the son of Irving Hornstein, executive vice-president of Schenley Industries, a very large corporation. Young William was admitted to the Chicago Medical School shortly after dear old dad contributed 100,000 dollars to that institution. William's pre-med academic record makes it unlikely he would have gained acceptance were he an ordinary, middle-class child. And then, in Philadelphia, two members of the state legislature were sentenced to jail for taking bribes for having got rich kids into a tax-supported medical school in Pennsylvania.
, A rich lawyer father who bought his kid a
place in another school defended his conduct by saying It's the whole person, not just scores on tests, that makes a good doctor.' He's undoubtedly correct and his son's subsequent career in medicine suggests that the rich son with the substandard test scores has turned into a reasonably competent physician; but that's not likely to impress Black and Mexican students who also often have slightly less than satisfactory grades but none of daddy's bucks to buy them a chance to succeed in a career like medicine.
In that connection there is a special piquancy in the case of Ramona Mrak, the daughter-in-law of the Chancellor of the University of California at Davis. With test scores thirty points below the usual level of acceptance, Ramona was let into medical school at the very university which is involved in an epic suit over preference admissions of blacks (the celebrated Bakke case the country is waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on).
American academic bureaucrats may have been even more disconcerted about Gabrielle Ann Scott Elliott than about the revelations concerning medical schools. Gabrielle, a person with only two years of high school, used somebody else's college transcript from Vasser to gain admission to the University of South Carolina Law School. The woman not only earned above average grades, she distinguished herself by doing research for a couple of law professors, taught legal writing to freshman law students and starred in moot court competitions. She then went to the University of Washington in Seattle andigot herself a master's degree in environmental law.
Gabrielle had also overcome an adolescent record of shoplifting and bad cheque bouncing to reach her professional status, but, instead of being regarded as reformed and rehabilitated, she has been defrocked and disbarred. `Character and fitness are as important parts of entering the Bar as passing the exam itself' was the sententious explanation vouched forth by one official. `If someone lies one time, the question is, when will he stop?' But if you ask most American laymen if lawyers lie, the answer you'll get is, do birds fly? Do beef-drinkers belch?
It's important for middle-class morale that there be no serious doubts that all opportunities are apportioned on the basis of merit. Since cases like Gabrielle's illustrate how merit, if one pan test for it at all, IS only intermittently important in career advancement, the lady and what she sit' nifies will soon be forgetten. Life America is supposed to be a fairand-square, equal-opportunity horse race, and that's the end of it, unless you happen to be one of the horses with an extra lead weight dropped in your saddle bags. Whatever the arrangements at the starting gate, after several furlongs a few horses are waY out in front of the field. The best figures available — and it is noteworthy because we don't like to collect too many statistics in this area — show that there has been no appreciable change in the distribution of wealth since the turn of the century. Five per cent of the population probably owns 60 per cent of the wealth. As if to underscore that observation, for the first time members of the House of Representatives had to make public data, albeit rather incomplete data, on their wealth. Much was made of Rep. Edward 3. Markey, a thirty-one-year-old Democrat from Massachusetts, who listed no assets other than his $57,500 congressional salarY, and who is still paying off a loan that put hist through college. He needn't be undulY worried. If he is like his older colleagues he will die well-fixed.
An analysis of the financial position of twenty randomly-selected members of the House shows that most are extremely rich with many thousands of dollars of stocks and bonds and valuable real estate. If the Senate has traditionally been the millionaire's club, then the House is the hundred-thousand-aire club of the upPer middle class. Americans may say that politics is a dirty business refined people ought not to engage in, but these figures show that they not only engage in it, but dominate it. With or without Mr Markey, the men and women who make the laws are much, much richer than those for whom they say they speak.
Considerably more attention was paid to the gay rights referendum held in Min' neapolis. Homophilia was defeated by five votes to three and the law making it a minor sort of crime to refuse to rent a room in your home to a homosexual was repealed. The issues in the election were irretrievablY distorted by the howls and bombast of born-again, jackleg preachers who made it a vote on the morality of having sex with one's own gender. Many a sad undoubtedly voted for the gays — words like queer, fruity
and sissy are prohibited now — out of irritation at these vulgar evangelicals in double-knit leisure suits who wear large, gangster-style diamonds on their pinkies. Nevertheless, despite this defeat the homosexuals are to be felicitated for convincing millions of straights that they, as blacks once did, now require special legislation to lift them from a life of poverty and degradation. This point is usually made on a television talk show by a very successful gay Who imagines he's suffering for the cause When a headwaiter asks him to wait while his table is being set.
But while the gays are fighting for the constitutional right to flick limp wrists where they're not wanted, this year's fashion is to have no sex at all. The public prints abound in articles with trendy titles like 'Libido's end,' Going off,' Not getting off,' and 'Are you an asexual without knowing it?' Professors of psychiatry like Helen Singer Kaplan are being quoted explaining that 'For some people sex is fraught with so much anxiety, anger and negative emotion, that it may be a better adaptation not to risk it.' Which is how it goes in America, the paradise of pleasure lost.
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