A [SICK] SOCIETY?
After the earthquake,
James Bowman reports on
what upsets Americans
Washington YOU might have expected a lot of people in and around San Francisco last week to experience vuja de, which means, accord- ing to William Safire, 'the eerie sense that you never want to be in this place again'. But everyone interviewed on television or in the papers seemed to want to say, 'I'm scared but I'm staying.' Perhaps they had to comb the silicon valleys for such people, to give their newscasts the upbeat conclu- sions that the networks love; perhaps there are yards of discarded videotape on which people said, 'I'm scared and I'm moving to Oklahoma.'
It wouldn't surprise me. The truths that the American media regard as palatable or otherwise reveal a remarkable set of sensi- bilities. In its report of the earthquake, the `liberal' Washington Post quoted a World Series baseball fan who was up a light pole at the appropriately named Candlestick Park at 5.04: 'I was so scared I [vomited]: What does that mean? He [vomited]. He vomited in a box? No, just that the prim Post imagines that its readers cannot sto- mach the word 'puke'.
What keeps coming up in print and on the airwaves are images of plucky citizens and heroic rescue workers. They are allowed to hint at the horrors they have seen but are the more heroic for being tightlipped about them. Endless, too, are the stories of community spirit and co- operation and ingenuity in making shift. Sorta makes you feel good to be an American. Which is the point. Dan Rather got misty-eyed on the CBS Evening News as he said, 'These people will be back — all the way back.'
Not long before the earthquake another Californian got a jolt. On 7 October Mr William Allen, chairman of the US Civil Rights Commission, outraged his fellow commissioners by giving a speech entitled `Black? Animals? Homosexuals? What is a Minority?' The conservative churchmen he was speaking to opposed homosexual rights and Mr Allen, a Reagan appointee and a black man, was trying to persuade them to the opposite view — not because homosexuals ought to be viewed with particular approval but because their rights as individual citizens takes precedence over their membership of that subclass of citizens.
His argument was based on the premise that people do not have rights as members of specially favoured groups but as indi- viduals. If you suppose that blacks are granted civil rights as members of a pri- vileged minority then such rights are 'mere indulgences' subject to revocation. The analogy with animals, which Allen called 'gravely erroneous', had been made by environmentalist enthusiasts keen to ex- tend the indulgence of white liberal society to animals as it had once been extended to blacks, and its fallacy was his point in decrying 'the idiocy of notions of protected groups in society'.
On the basis of the title and without having read this speech, the other commis- sioners voted six to two to call it 'thought- less, disgusting and unnecessarily in- flammatory'. Some things, it seems, are even worse to say in public than 'puke'. When it was revealed that Mr Allen had written a letter of resignation as chairman (though he intended to remain as a com- missioner), it was widely supposed that it was because of this speech. Both the New York Times, which cited it as an example of 'erratic behaviour' and the Wall Street Journal, which defended Allen, seemed to make this assumption.
In fact, the resignation was submitted a month before the speech and the outcry which accompanied it, but there has still not been any reply from the Bush adminis- tration. Instead there have been rumours and even reports from named White House officials that a new chairman has already been appointed. He is supposed to be Mr Arthur 'Fletcher, the man who invented `the Philadelphia plan' by which a certain percentage of government contracts must go to 'minority' contractors — exactly the sort of thinking that Allen opposed.
Congressman Don Edwards, whose California district is adjacent to the epicentre of the earthquake, is the Chair- man of the Civil and Constitutional Rights subcommittee of the House Judiciary com- mittee and is responsible for overseeing the work of the commission. When 1 talked to him on the telephone he welcomed Fletch- er's appointment, which he treated as fact, and said that Allen's resignation had been requested by President Bush. Allen vehe- mently denies this and adds that Fletcher cannot have been appointed because he is not a member of the commission, on which there will be no vacancy until the end of November.
If he had trouble with his enemies, however, consider his friends. The White House's behaviour to an appointee of the administration of which George Bush was a part has been unpardonably rude. Then he found a defender in another Califor- nian, Congressman William Dannemeyer, the member for Disneyland who believes that Aids victims 'emit spores' that can infect innocent passers-by with the disease. He spoke up in the House against 'the fascist-like activities of the militant homosexual movement' of which he saw Allen as a victim.
Dannemeyer also read into the Congres- sional Record an emotional letter from Allen to Congressman Edwards in which he deplores Edwards's 'veiled threats', tells him 'I am not your "boy" ', quotes 011ie North on the 'criminalisation of policy differences' and concludes by saying, `No matter what you do to me, there is a justice, and you will one day feel it.' The letter is not likely to do its writer much good in official Washington. Nor is the support of the conservative Orange County Register, which took up the cudgels on his behalf and lent further credence to the belief that he had resigned in humiliation and under pressure from militant homosex- uals and his colleagues on the commission.
Poor Mr Allen! All this • because he mentioned animals and homosexuals in the same sentence, a juxtaposition which Con- gressman Edwards calls 'indelicate'. You can never be quite sure what the best people will find indelicate these days, but here's something that is apparently OK. Penthouse magazine took out a full-page ad last week in the New York Times to convince people to take it seriously as an organ of hard-hitting investigative journal- ism. A three-quarter page photograph of a hooded Ku Klux Klansman bears the legend, 'Not everybody under a sheet in Penthouse is in the mood for love.' A blurb extolling the magazine's daring exposure of the fact that the Klan is devoted to race hatred ends with the slogan, 'Penthouse: where nothing is more naked than the truth.' That is to say, the kind of truth, whether anodyne or uplifting, that the tasteful liberal consensus likes to hear.
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