Pledging My Time; Libertarian Justice for All
As a 45-year-old man who remembers, to my kids' fascination, air-raid drills and huddling under desks (as if that would keep anyone safe from a commie A-bomb) for five minutes or so, I've had my ups and downs with the Pledge. As a youngster it was just the norm during homeroom, no different from the dusty Ten Commandments frame that hung behind the teacher's desk, but when I was a 60s longhair, the mandatory recitation got on my nerves. By the time I was in 10th grade, Huntington High, like most public (and private) schools, was in political chaos, and half the class invariably sat down, defiantly, during the exercise. Including me.
It affected the staff as well. My English teacher, a 25-year-old named Bob Leonard (Mr. Leonard during classes, "Bob" if you saw him after school), was clearly conflicted about his role as a disciplinarian for some 30 students. I never did find out how he escaped service in the Vietnam War (4-F, high lottery number, conscientious objector, who knows?), but he was filling time before pursuing what he considered a more meaningful career. So, while he made a halfhearted attempt to tout Dickens, more often it was On the Road, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. We tackled poetry by presenting our favorite rock lyrics: it was a mixture of Dylan, Joni Mitchell, the Grateful Dead ("Uncle John's Band" was then in vogue, pre-Deadhead mania) and the Stones, at least for the hippies. One afternoon, smart-aleck Jerry Blithefield was called on to offer his contribution. "Uh, Jerry, we're waiting," Mr. Leonard said. Jerry, so stoned that not even Visine could hide his altered state, replied: "Bob, what I'm doing right now is harmonizing in my head with James Taylor. We're singing 'Sweet Baby James.' I suggest the entire class do the same."
Whether this itinerary was sub-rosa or not I'm not sure, but the school's principal had other problems that were more pressing. Like when a group of students (mostly white), in the spring of '71, held a two-day sit-in ostensibly to protest the paucity of "African culture" courses. Frankly, I believed then (and still do) that it was more an instinctive reaction to what was happening on college campuses?where Soul on Ice still ruled?than a well-constructed plan of civil disobedience, but about a fourth of the teenagers participated.
I recall Mr. Leonard passing by the lobby, where we all sat, listening to the inflated rhetoric of two seniors, and asking if I were going to attend his class that day. "No way," I replied, "This is where it's at, man." He smiled and said, "Right on!" It caused a bit of a stir: the local weekly sent a photographer and reporter, and a few days later, square in the middle of the front page, I was captured in print, along with my friends Elena, Mike, Scott and Tom. My parents weren't exactly thrilled, but with four older sons they were difficult to surprise, and didn't lose too much sleep over the matter.
After the second day's "class-stoppage," I smelled a rat upon eavesdropping on the conversation of two ringleaders. "That was a ball-buster today, I need a joint really bad," was the bravado from an attention-seeker who probably long ago tossed his "Question Authority" button and is now a plastic surgeon. Translation: These guys were having a ball, and politics ran a distant second to feeling the adulation of the crowd and, not so incidentally, of the chicks who hung on their every word. Several couples got together, however fleetingly, as a result of the sit-in, and obviously Angela Davis was a mere backdrop. Still, it was a lot of fun, and nominally instructive, despite marking the beginning of the end of a balanced high school education?the ultimate result of such protests.
And this was before the women's movement got into the act, followed by the nascent gay liberation flowering, which so befuddled teachers and administrators that less than a decade later a school's curriculum was a patchwork of left-wing cant (some of it valid) and the hysterical insistence that the oppressive regime in South Africa was a far more worthy topic of study than the U.S. Constitution, the Industrial Revolution and the two world wars. By the 1980s, if a student stayed home for a day with the flu, he or she would have no idea what the Gettysburg Address was, much less who wrote it.
I was reminded of those larks of 30 years ago while reading a well-intended but hopelessly naive article in The Washington Post on March 4. The author, Patrick Welsh, a longtime English teacher at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, VA, was struggling with the common problem that loads of boomers face today: How do you instill common sense in teenagers who are subject to peer pressure, class-consciousness and the age-old lure of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll? It's certainly a valid question, especially since parents today have their own pasts to either fib or come clean about, but Welsh writes as if promiscuity, recklessness and?let's face it?constructive curiosity are unique to the current generation of high-schoolers.
Welsh discusses the recent car-crash death of his daughter Claire's classmate, which provides a sober lead-in for his ruminations about the justifiable worries of a father whose child is rapidly becoming an adult and will soon be on her own in college. Fair enough. However, this is hardly a bulletin.
He says: "The wild party scene has become ingrained in the culture of our teens, regardless of family background or income, and parents like me are confused and ambivalent about what to do about it. Take the party scandal of the current school year: Last December, a gathering or more than 200 young people at the home of a St. Stephen's and St. Agnes student whose parents were out of town was busted by police, and 23 teens, all but one of them students at this Alexandria Episcopal school, were taken into custody."
He later quotes a Bethesda, MD, child and adolescent psychiatrist, Lawrence Brain, who said that while kids today are better educated about the dangers of excessive alcohol consumption, date rape, safe sex and random violence, troubles still abound. The children of today, Brain says, "don't believe the rhetoric of the establishment about marijuana. They see it as just a parental control issue rather than the reality. It's been demonstrated that marijuana affects cognitive functioning and memory and leads to apathy and lack of motivation. But it's been getting more popular with adolescents for a long time."
Mr. Brain had to buy a medical degree to come up with this conclusion?
It's lazy and misleading that the media and universities routinely issue annual reports about drug use: some years it's up, some years it's down. LSD, pot and cocaine make "comebacks," which inevitably furnish cover stories for intellectually impoverished magazines like New York, leading academics and government officials to blather on about the "epidemic."
Guess what? Recreational?and addictive?consumption of drugs has been a staple of adolescent and young adult behavior since, oh, the late 60s. It's never gone away, and probably never will. Frankly, the legalization of at least "soft" drugs would be a step in the right direction. For one thing, it would clear out the prisons for people who really belong there. One of the few positive things Bill Clinton accomplished with his last-minute slew of pardons was to take Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner's advice and free a number of inmates who've been rotting in jail for minor drug offenses.
I'm not holding my breath, but President Bush would bank huge political capital if next Christmas he pardoned 1000 more "criminals" who are the victims of draconian, and ancient, drug laws. That's one way to reach out to white left-wingers (not that they'll give him any credit) and the black community (which will, I believe, look at Bush in a different light). As for his conservative base, there will be a rumbling from the likes of Gary Bauer, but they've got John Ashcroft (thankfully) as attorney general, a number of pro-life administration officials, inevitable tax cuts, the promise of tort reform and a devout Christian in office.
A humanitarian decree like this makes a lot of sense. I'm not going squishy on law enforcement, and certainly don't buy into the "hate-crimes" nonsense that the left obscures political dialogue with, but citizens who are jailed for petty drug possession simply don't belong in the same facilities with rapists, armed thieves, arsonists and murderers.
In any case, high school and college parties where drugs and alcohol are prevalent didn't start when the children of boomers became teenagers. There are differences?cellphones, more condoms and more au courant controlled substances?but the song is the same. I recall one particular party back in '71, on a gorgeous Indian-summer night, where some 100 kids had taken over the house and backyard of a kid whose folks were away for the weekend. I was pretty high?on mescaline or pot, I don't remember which?and walked around with a detached view of the scene.
It was fascinating. I walked into the kitchen to get a beer and, in a clothes closet, door fully open, a friend of mine was getting a blowjob from a chick he'd just met. He waved and casually yelled, "Hey, Rusty!" Kids were puking on the sidewalk; in the living room a keg overflowed; and the sweet smell of marijuana was a terrific complement to the blaring sound of Who's Next on the stereo. I went outside, back in the bushes to take a leak, and two classmates were fumbling and fucking, like it was their own personal Woodstock. A friend of mine, Rosemary, told me, as if I cared: "Oh, it's okay, Debbie and Tom really like other."
Hey, no skin off my nose.
There's no doubt that, uh, male chauvinism has been amply exposed in the intervening years, but as usual the incidences of "date rape" have been exaggerated in today's culture. Fortunately, outright sexual violence is no longer all but concealed, but the politicization of sex has claimed too many victims, especially on college campuses. Two kids get drunk, fool around in a dorm room and in the light of day a "crime" has been committed, always by the male. Once upon a time, there was something known as a one-night stand, with two willing participants who probably wouldn't waste their time on each other if sober, and the next morning both of them would chalk it up as "an experience."
Even the gang bang, a distasteful activity in my view, wasn't always one-sided. I'll never forget, as a freshman at Johns Hopkins, hitching a ride up to Manhattan with a senior?I didn't know the guy, but found his "I'll drive and we split the gas" notice on the mailroom bulletin board?and hearing his story of a frat party the night before. Somewhat incredulously, my roommate Mark and I listened as he told us how a Goucher student took on seven guys in a bedroom, all waiting on line for their turn. "Well, what was that like?" I asked. "Actually," he said, "we were all pretty wasted and I couldn't even get it up. Which was really embarrassing since the chick?I never knew her name?went back to the dancefloor and told all her friends how we stacked up. Dick sizes and everything. She was laughing her ass off. It wasn't a prime moment."
Again, I don't mean to minimize real abuse, but every picture tells a different story, and some college kids, mostly male, are getting screwed by cowed administrators and mobs of strident feminists.
On the other hand, Charles Murray wrote a repellent op-ed piece for The Wall Street Journal last month that, if I hadn't given up grass years ago, might've provoked me to send gift subscriptions to The Progressive or Mother Jones to half a dozen innocent friends. The headline said it all: "Prole Models: America's elites take their cues from the underclass." Murray's lead sentence leaves no doubt in which direction he'll wander: "That American life has coarsened over the past several decades is not much argued, but the nature of the beast is still in question."
Well, that's original thinking. I'd say American life has changed?journalists, although perhaps not Murray, use computers instead of typewriters today?but "coarsened"? No, it's simply evolved.
Murray writes, in a particularly offensive passage: "Language, appearance, sex, and family: Each of the signs by which we used to recognize a member of the underclass fails today. But the proletarianization of the dominant minority [a phrase Murray borrows from Arnold Toynbee] has broader implications than changes in social norms. What we are witnessing is the aftermath of a collapse of the code of the elites, creating a vacuum in which underclass behavior takes on the elements of a code. By code I mean your internal yardstick for tracking how you measure up to a standard that is accepted by those whose approval you seek."
It's the tired right-wing bugaboo of blaming the 60s for anything you find distasteful today. And it's a stupid line of reasoning. Sure, Murray dresses his essay up with examples of proper manners he believes (although he doesn't admit it) were once largely the province of the educated and well-bred. Like being honest and loyal, not taking advantage of people, being a good sport and not swearing in public. Can't argue with those virtues. But here's a doozy: "When the ship went down, one put the women and children into the lifeboats and waved goodbye with a smile."
Excuse me? I agree that the lives of children, in a perilous situation, are paramount, but who ever "smiled" when he was about to drown?
And this: "Respectfulness toward, and imitation of, underclass behavior extend to the other classic signals that used to distinguish nice people from riff-raff. Appearance? The hooker look in fashion, tattoos, and body piercing is the obvious evidence, although Toynbee would probably see as much significance in wearing jeans to church. I find the intriguing element here to be the respectfulness extended toward underclass appearance. No one in the public eye calls any kind of dress 'cheap' or 'sleazy' any more. Sexual behavior? As late as 1960, sleeping with one's boyfriend was still a lower-class thing to do. Except in a few sophisticated circles, a woman of the elites did it furtively, and usually with the person she expected to marry. Behavior that is now considered absolutely normal was considered sluttish in 1960."
Murray ought to ride his horse back to the 19th century. He throws sops to the nonelites who are decent, caring people, and while I have no quarrel with his inherent stand against issues like racial quotas, his disgust with political mendacity (he cites Bill Clinton, a clever?if obvious?ploy to win converts to his generally putrid opinions) and his sense of the corrupting influence of unions on today's marketplace, this is one sorry messenger for the advocacy of a polite society. Bill Kristol, yes; President Bush, certainly. But I don't believe that Murray is a proponent of the American Dream; I don't believe that he's in favor of immigration; and I don't believe he considers a butcher, baker or candlestick maker his social equal. He reminds me a lot of Pat Buchanan, without the latter's populist rhetoric, which was adopted for his wacky presidential campaigns.
Charles Murray says, "If the dominant minority still possessed a cultural code with spine and élan, Eminem would have no more chance of recording his lyrics than a four-letter word had of getting into Sports Illustrated in 1960." Which tells me that this bespoke thug would've, in the 50s, 60s or 70s, written the same kind of nonsense about Elvis, Warhol, the Beatles, the Sex Pistols or Martin Scorsese.
Murray is an intelligent man and makes a few cogent points. Just as, on the other end of the spectrum, it's possible to find shreds of truth in the demagoguery of the detestable Alan Dershowitz and Mario Cuomo. But it's the sheer narrowmindedness of his limited value system that makes your eyes feel singed after reading an essay like this. As I stated above, I choose to send my children to a school where Thomas Carlyle and Jefferson Davis are not unfamiliar names; on the rare church occasion, I wear a suit; and I hold doors open for women. But Charlie, dude, live and let live.
In conclusion, my last snub of a harmless American ritual was in 1975 at an Orioles-Red Sox game at Baltimore's Memorial Stadium. The O's, although they were a championship team, didn't draw overflow crowds, and I was able to snag a pair of press-box tickets because of my college newspaper credentials. Which was cool: great seats, free hotdogs and beer and an opportunity to interview Luis Tiant and Bill Lee in the Sox clubhouse before the game. Anyway, when "The Star Spangled Banner" was sung just before the ump cried, "Play ball!" my friend and I refused to stand up and participate?even keeping our caps on?which really pissed off the older sportswriters at the Baltimore Sun. In fact, words were exchanged and I later concluded that pointless "rebellions" were more trouble than they were worth.
As it turns out, the national anthem?which has Baltimore roots?is one of my favorite songs, right up there with "Onward Christian Soldiers," "Mr. Tambourine Man," "Meat Is Murder," "God Bless America" and "Ain't That Peculiar."
Which leaves me wondering right now?Charles Murray aside?and paraphrasing Nick Lowe: What's so funny about the Ten Commandments, the Pledge of Allegiance and a moment devoted to prayer in public and private schools today?
March 5