Free speech in the 90s, More Honky Talk . . .

BLITHE SPIRIT  Vol. 1, No. 2 March 13, 1996 Two Cents and worth it.

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Teaching high school boys 30-plus years ago, I came on a great line to quash racial suspicion, which was important if only to get on with the darn class, dubbed Religion/Social Problems by an unsuspecting principal. Social problems included "the race problem."

My students were almost all white, more precisely 97%, three of about 100 not white. These nonwhites were allotted one to a section. They sat there, more or less comfortable, serving a good purpose, namely to dampen cruder expression of the racial chauvinism that was never far from the surface. These middle '60s were not your halcyon days of race relations, not to say I have any halcyon days in mind.

My line was a stroke of genius, if I may say so: "There are black bastards and white bastards," I told my students, and it stopped them every time. I have wondered why and have concluded this: first, the term "black bastards" gained immediate agreement. My racially chauvinist students resonated with that easily. It fit their preconceptions.

Second, "white bastards" also gained agreement, because almost all had known far more white than black bastards in their life, being themselves white. They knew about it from experience, rather than as largely untested dogma.

Third, I was pushing for racial equality by emphasizing the negative. None of this we're-all-brothers stuff. My students had trouble enough buying that with or without racial hostilities. If we're all brothers, why do we give such good imitations of being enemies?

My students could resonate with a position that recognized their failings. Grumbling all the way to the lunchroom, they could at least make this start, perversely: as bad as we are, we could always be worse. That's a variation on a line from my sainted Aunt Enid, who said it about things, not us.

She died in the middle of a work day, at 63, knowing full well that things could always be worse.

Abdul's song . . .

He's the Denver Nougat (Nugget, sorry) player who wouldn't stand for the U.S. anthem, which he says stands for oppression. If you see him, ask "Compared to what?" The Saudi Arabian anthem? He'd have at least a finger removed for pulling this in Mecca, where they have interesting ways of dealing with his ilk.

Gloss on Honky Talk . . .

Back in those bad-good old days of the '60s, the idea was to achieve even-handedness in what we blithely called race relations. Don't discriminate. Be fair. Skin color counts for zilch. Down deep they're just like us. Only white bastards? You kidding? Get real. That sort of thing.

Now it's bend-over-backwards. We're culturally determined, and vastly different. We're different, we're different, we're -- DIVERSE! That's it! All God's chillun got diversity, ain't it wonderful?

Mama's Cousin Ed, who lived in New York, would shoot down prejudice with the reminder that the borough of Manhattan had a black president. Ed had the Buick ad account and hung out at 21 and the Stork Club. Got box seats for Giants games, when they were New York Giants, autographed baseballs and the like.

These were the '40s. Talking to white folks in the '50s, I heard another version of the black-&-white-bastards idea. In living rooms, on trains, in teacher conferences, time and again I heard the folk wisdom: "There's good and bad of all kinds." . . . .

Stop! Moralism afoot!

Is what I just said moralistic and mealymouthed, trite and regurgitative? I'm not sure. If so, let us not descend to it. It's pulpit talk. For the masses, not for us chickens here.

What is this "good and bad of all kinds" business? No, my friends, we are faced with something far more revolutionary than that. We have revolution on our hands, a great new world a-coming. Let us be above such so-called folk wisdom . . .

The Religion of Environmentalism . . .

Let us consider how worldly concerns -- yes, my brothers and sisters, worldly (Burt Lancaster as Elmer Gantry here) -- have taken the place of religion.

Our school curricula and classrooms are full of environmentalism and other such concerns, just as Catholic schools were full of Things Catholic when I was a kid. A good thing too. Just as Catholic and Missouri-Lutheran and other religion-based schools today, where instruction is interlarded with religion.

Public schools have always had their substitutes for this -- good citizenship, patriotism, as in "I pledge allegiance to the flag . . . "

But patriotism is passe. We know too much or think we do to love our country, which is too rich and too powerful to be liked, much less loved.

We are to be citizens of the world -- a classic Athenian-Greek idea, by the way, it's where we got "cosmopolitan." And the world is threatened, says the Club of Rome and other Armageddon predictors. So let us embrace a new religion, environmentalism.

Let us get nervous, not to say neurotic, about it. Let child turn on parent, parent on grandparent -- "J'accuse!" when plastic is tossed out with the paper. How dare you do that to the planet, Mother? Father?

Sorry, I wasn't thinking.

That's the trouble with your generation, Mother, Father, you haven't been thinking. And look where we are today, with the Club of Rome dangling over our head.

Sorry.

Tragedy, Anyone?

When the sword of Damocles, not the club of Rome, was over our heads, we used to think tragic. (Sure.)

We did. We used to think there weren't answers to things. Now we know better and are immensely happier. (Hear, hear.)

Once we thought the world would end with bang or whimper. Now we think with Angry Young male novelists that maybe we won't die.

A hundred years from now, nobody will know the difference, my father used to say, when fathers had something to say that people remembered. Can you imagine that line going unchallenged today?

Make a difference, we hear. Not to decide is to decide. If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. Make the world a little better place. We rear our Oak Park & River Forest young with that ideal.

Hope reigns supreme. Tragedy? Forget it.

The tragic happens anyhow, of course. But where's the philosophy to help us deal with it? Where's the realism? Lost in mealymouth talk?

What set him off? . . .

What set me off was a seemingly innocuous Wall St. Journal article (3/7/96) about the "hype machine" gearing up for Our Stolen Future, a new book by a 69-year old zoologist, the next Rachel Carson. She is Theo Colborn, who with two co-authors says we are putting our descendants' hormones at risk by toxic chemicals we ingest and carry around.

Al Gore wrote the foreward, Robert Redford came up with a dust jacket quote. Colborn and the other two "are being squired around" to big media people. (I mean big-media people, not big media-people. OK? I mean Redford is a little guy, I hear, but he's big, you know?)

Advice on publicity is coming from a firm that "created the 1989 Alar-on-apples uproar that practically destroyed the reputation of apples . . . using questionable . . . evidence," WSJ tells us. (Them again?)

The trick was to flood the outlets so that everybody and her brother knew about Alar on (in?) apples, "not just the policy elite," the campaign's creator explained in a memo.

Chemical and other such industries are preparing rebuttals. "When hype starts, reason stops, and then you're in a big pickle," says the v.p-communications of the American Cucumber Assn. -- did I say cucumber? American Crop Assn. His impression is that the book "indicts modern society since World War II."

Even the authors fear the situation being portrayed as "more apocalyptic than it is." But it's worth it, says Colborn. "We've struck a nerve," she says.

Watch out.

Tragic . . .

It's tragic the lack of a sense of tragedy in the world, especially in the liberal community. Naivete is rampant. How dare things go wrong? You mean kids get kicked out of this high school? How dare you? You mean there are poor people? How dare the world turn that way? There's injustice? Perish the thought!

The good fight is always there to be fought, but without hope of winning, if you please. That's wisdom, as opposed to sophomoric "stamp out evil" campaigns that arise regularly.

Seneca, our old Roman friend, went after the idea that the wise man [we would, rightly, say person] should get mad at evil. If he did, he wouldn't have time for much else, says Seneca.

"Never will (he) cease to be angry." Why? Because "every place is full of crime and vice . . . Men struggle in a mighty rivalry of wickedness."

He quotes the poet Ovid: "No guest from host is safe, nor father-in-law from son-in-law; not even brothers get along. Husband and wife are out to catch each other in the act . . . "

Seneca picks up the litany: ". . . bands of horsemen scouring the land to find citizens in their hiding places, springs poisoned, man-made plague, crowded prisons, fires that burn whole cities to the ground," etc.

It's all part of his argument why the wise man has to swear off anger at others' misdeeds: he'd have time for nothing else.

Shakespeare spelled out the same thing as the wages of lust: "the expense of spirit in a waste of shame . . . savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust . . . A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe; Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream." In other words, no bargain. So what? "All this the world well knows; yet none knows well, To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell."

We never learn. This is realism. It's classical thinking -- possible antidote to our romanticism. It helps us grow up and stop acting like kids, ever surprised when things go badly.

N.B. In due time I will ask to hear from those who want no more of these cluttering their mail. Not yet. I couldn't bear to hear it. In due time after that, I will ask to hear from those who do want it cluttering their mail. That should prune the list considerably, saving me postage or -- conceivably -- making room for yet other readers.