Mind of an Outlaw (79 page)

To restore the promise of American democracy, we would do well to search for the viability of small business, the return of the family farm, and the cleaner labor union. During the presidential campaign, we can do no more than hint at such claims. But is it too much to hope that we Democrats will come up with a candidate who will have the personal integrity to convince both liberals and some conservatives that, while they will not find support for each and every one of their favorite political desires,
they will still have the satisfaction of working toward a less lunatic America? If even one-tenth of the Republican vote were to move over to the Democrats, victory could be assured. The question opens: What could such a candidate offer to both sides that might excite them enough to pass over their parochial demands?

The devil has to be in the details. Tax write-offs, tax rebates, tax moratoria have been used repeatedly to enrich corporations, but our real need is to restrict tax relief to those enterprises that benefit the whole economy rather than a privileged corner of it. In a time of worrisome joblessness, why not reduce taxes for all businesses in direct proportion to the number of new jobs they create? Indeed, the obverse can also be effective. Any business that chooses to pare its working force to take in immediate profit could give up a proportion of the new and extra income in added taxes. If it will be argued that such an emphasis on sophisticated taxation will be steering the federal government’s nose into every business, the answer is that American capitalism brought this upon itself. As a system, it works considerably better than Communism, but it has its own built-in vices. The free market is not an economic miracle. If Communism failed ultimately because the degree of selflessness demanded of human beings was not enough to counteract the self-enriching urges of the human ego, so capitalism in its turn has demonstrated that greed is no magic elixir, but, to the contrary, greed is greed, and can drive its acolytes into economic hysteria. There is a human balance between self-interest and selflessness. It is not only possible, but likely, that a powerful desire is developing in America to become more honest about ourselves and less overheated in our patriotism. For what is excessive patriotism but unadmitted dread that all too much is wrong?

While it is sometimes remarked that the poor performance of children in public schools is linked to watching TV for several hours a day, another factor, more invidious, is not mentioned:
the constant insertion of commercials into TV programs. There used to be a time in childhood when one could develop one’s power of concentration (which may be the most vital element in the ability to learn) by following a sustained narrative, by reading, for example. Now a commercial interrupts nearly all TV presentations every seven to twelve minutes. The majority of our children have lost any expectation that concentration will not be broken into.

Our plank on education will, of course, parade forth the predictable nostrums—new schools, smaller classes, higher salaries for teachers. We can attack George W. Bush’s program, No Child Left Behind, which shows no signs of working. Whatever programs we offer are bound to do less harm than No Child Left Behind, but the basic problem—TV commercials—will remain. It would probably do more good if a portion of the proposed funds for public school education could replace fluorescent lighting in just about every classroom with old-fashioned light-bulbs. The unadmitted truth is that every human alive loses personal appeal under the flat illumination of a fluorescent tube. Children can hardly feel as ready to learn when everyone around them, including their teacher, is a hint ghastly in skin tone.

We are, of course, not ready to tell the electorate that TV advertising has become an albatross upon the American spirit with its instruments of persuasion—noise, disjunction, mendacity and manipulation. Is it possible, given the federal government’s soon ravenous need for new kinds of funds, to consider a special tax on advertising? Since the radical right will at once be screaming that this is an attack on free speech, we could term it removal of a business deduction, a penalty for those advertising expenses that go beyond standard industry practice. However phrased, there is no reason for a healthy economy to need to encourage hyped-up marketing for shoddy products. One example we do not dare suggest, not as yet, is to take a good look at the heavy competition in marketeering among the fast-food chains. Very much alike are all of them, and they serve the same social purpose—inexpensive meals quickly available. If they could be encouraged to cease advertising against one another, our children might be spared untold hours of inroads on their attention
(plus the accompanying inclination to grab a snack and get a little more obese). Besides, the money saved by the chains, given restrained merchandising, could go into the real risk of competition. Let it depend on the improved quality of their wares!

If we are to appeal to conservatives and environmentalists alike, we could suggest that we are in need of an enlarged Food and Drug Administration to explore the long-term effects of nonbiodegradables on public health. Plastic, after all, derives from what was once the waste products of oil. It might even be fair to say that plastic is the excrement of oil, but that would be an abuse of language. Organic excrement can nourish the earth, whereas plastics do not decompose for thousands of years if at all and never revitalize one acre of soil. Meanwhile, our children are raised from infancy with toys composed of synthetic materials in constant contact with their fingertips and their lips. What does that do to them? Such research is, of course, a long way down the road, but our plank could address the ecological problems that plastic refuse presents to the environment. Why not suggest higher rates of taxation on throwaway items that inundate our town and city dumps, there never to decompose?

Of course, the depredations that oil brings to the environment may be the leading problem our civilization faces in the century ahead and therefore is larger than our present readiness to recognize problems that do not have ready solutions. If all too many Americans don’t like any question that takes longer than ten seconds to answer, it can be replied that we now have the president we deserve.

Prisons! The problem owes half its weight to drug laws of the early 1970s that criminalized marijuana possession. The fear then was that America would become a nation of young druggies.
We didn’t. We became instead a land of air, soil, and river pollution. (The anal emissions of warehoused pigs took over our prairie.) Meanwhile, our prisons were overstuffed with young convicts. Since America is hardly ready to legalize drugs (and empty those prisons by half), there are some unhappy figures to deal with.

In 2003 our inmate population set a record—2,166,260. We have the ratio of incarceration you would expect from Third World tyrannies. Our penitentiaries are loaded with drug offenders serving long sentences for minor infractions.

Can we dare propose that the nation, given the financial relief it would afford, begin to release a good number of minor offenders? A pilot program to explore the question is feasible, even for a convention plank. Some inmates might be released for drug treatment. Marijuana smokers, and petty dealers, could, for example, be given parole on the premise that they would pay a fine if caught continuing their habit or their trade; if they did not have the funds to meet the penalty, they would be required to perform community service for modest pay until the debt is satisfied. To counter the objection that government moneys were being disbursed to excuse a vice, it could be pointed out that we invariably pay for such easy vices as cigarettes and whiskey. Do they or do they not kill more people than marijuana?

Roe v. Wade
probably repels more good conservatives than any other item in the liberal canon. Yet a serious and intimate recognition of the question could serve a new Democratic administration. Indeed, it is imperative. The present state of the argument strips all humanity from the equation. Those for the Right to Life see every pregnancy as God’s will, God’s intention: ergo, the abortionist and his patient are both evil. Defenders of
Roe v. Wade
view abortion as a woman’s right yet sully their position by postulating that abortion is not killing a future human being if it takes place within the first three months, or in the first six
months, or whenever. It is a stand to weaken one’s intellectual self-respect.

Is it possible to agree that abortion is indeed one more form of murder and yet is still a woman’s right? If God’s will is flouted, it is the woman, not the society, who will pay the price. That would be a huge and indigestible political move if it were ever stated just so. Yet as a species, we humans commit murder all the time, not only in war but by way of the meat and fish and fowl we send daily to our machines of extermination. Every piece of flesh at our tables was slain.

Such an argument is obviously not suited for travel in public. Lambs and cattle are not to be compared to humans, and war protects our endangered land, etc. Since the Right to Life will continue to insist that pregnancy is the direct expression of God’s will, let us approach that as the true field of battle for this debate. Sex, given its appeal, its mystery, its extravagances, its explorations, its commitments, its adventures—be they sordid or illuminating—sex by its unique entrance into our most private thoughts, compulsions, pleasures, and, yes, terrors, is for most humans an arena where we are aware of a presence that seems divine, but we are also sensitive often to another presence. Some fornications feel diabolically inspired. The question is begged in its entirety when we say “God’s will.” A pregnancy can seem a blessing to one woman and a nightmare to another. Most women are haunted by the fear of losing a child in their womb, but there will always be a minority who find themselves drawn to abortion. They are haunted by an opposite terror, the fear that they have conceived a monster.

If that becomes a woman’s deepest sentiment within a pregnancy, who has the authority to declare she is in error? She is, after all, convinced that her oncoming creation is evil. This may be the extreme case, but what of the woman who knows that her vanity is still so consumed with the need to maintain her youth and freedom that she senses how badly she would rear her child? A woman can have an honest recognition that she is too selfish or too timid or in too desperate a situation to bring an infant into the world. That much self-honesty can become the first step
in becoming more human or, at least, more adult. For rare is the woman who has an abortion without suffering her private horror.

The counterattack to the Right to Life is that no man has the authority to forbid abortion until we come to the end of all wars. Otherwise, since God is always on our side in war, it must be God’s desire that we look to exterminate strangers en masse. Such slayings are highly organized, of course, but they are first cousin to terrorism. We are killing people we know nothing about. We are also destroying full-grown humans into whom God may have put much interest and much intent.

Civil marriage for homosexuals is one more problem to divide liberals and conservatives. The prejudice runs deep. Most heterosexual men and women feel they have paid a life price to duty and responsibility by the act of getting married. So their resentment is profound. Why should gays enjoy the pleasures of the sybaritic yet have the civil and economic protections of marriage as well? The answer—and it will take more than one presidential election before these matters can be discussed openly—is that mutual comprehension and tolerance between heterosexuals and gay people may begin to come into being only after gay couples have taken on the yoke of marriage and, by adoption, children. Indeed, the saving irony to convince a few conservatives is that the desire among certain homosexuals to seek out the constraints of marriage does speak of an innate pull toward domestic cohabitation.

Besides, there is a more forceful argument. It is that in a democracy, everyone feels the need to find out who they are, what they are, and in which ways they can live and identify themselves. Is this not the theme underlining the Pursuit of Happiness? It is worth adding that every child adopted by a gay couple no longer has to spend his or her years in an orphanage. If that child might face special difficulties because the parents are gay, the question
to ask is whether the problems encountered will prove more dire than growing up in an institution.

It is still an outrage. Compared with other industrial powers, we do not have a comprehensive safety net. Indeed, much of the brouhaha over affirmative action is but the visible tip of the iceberg. Relatively restrained, the opponents of affirmative action give barely a hint of the deeper aversion many of them feel toward blacks and, to a lesser degree, Hispanics.

The real target has always been social welfare. There were men and women on the right who were enraged that whole sections of the population seemed content to raise large one-parent families and live off the government. Since their anger was often fueled by their own hard lives, they found it obscene that others did not have to work as conscientiously.

Let us eschew the bona fide reply that not all idle hands were happy to live with welfare. Once again, it is worth taking up the right-wing argument on its merits. They would be the first to say that work is a blessing. Let us assume it is. By such logic, the real suffering for those on welfare is, precisely, that they are deprived of that blessing. For the average human, white or black, man or woman, it is probably more difficult to live on the dole than to work. Boredom and shame do the work instead on the soul.

Can we stare into the center of the real moral issue? A nation indifferent to social welfare, a land so fevered with the free market that it would forgo all safety nets, a country without concern for its poorest members, deserving or undeserving, has become a society with distorted values. Whether one is full of belief in a higher authority or feels no belief, the basic notion, all flaws granted, is that democracy is still a system which assumes all human beings are of value. The concept is noble. But if the emphasis is on our own rights at all costs and we have become so swollen in our egomania that we are indifferent to the homeless sleeping on the street, even furious at the fact of their existence,
what kind of freedom are we then offering to the tyrannized of other countries? Bogged down in the grease-soaked sands of Iraq, we have transported ourselves to a future of large taxation to small purpose. We will have to pay off Bush’s extravagances. Why? Was it, at worst, that if all else failed, we could keep our budget deficit so big that we would never be able to provide a safety net? One of the answers to why we are at war in Iraq may be there. The harshness in the voice of the talk radio motor-mouths gives a clue.