March 1994 - Discover the Networks

VOLUME 2, NO. 7
MARCH 1994
I
know it is going to be a distinctive
academic experience when the woman
who answers the door at the suburban
San Diego house tells me to leave my shoes
at the door. I paid $7 to join this "Mark
Group" and am not sure what to expect.
Some guy is practically dry-humping a
woman on the couch, although the pair
attract little attention. Other couples are
engaging in spontaneous massage, but it
remains uncertain who had come with
whom. I keep hearing the phrases: "doing"
someone and "getting done by."
I sit across from a robust woman who
looks like Tip O'Neill. Men outnumber
women by a small margin. A woman who
describes herself as "a healer, an actress
and a travel agent" says that this is not
usually the case in the Mark Groups. We
go around the room for introductions,
which sometimes digress into short autobiographies, the ages run from about 25
to over 60. There are five masseuses,
many real estate people, some brokers and
copier salesmen, and one guy with a charter bus business.
When asked why she came, a woman
in a tight pink sweater responds: "To get
turned on." Others say they wanted to
meet people and have fun. "I had nothing
else to do," one man volunteers, "and this
is better than watching LA Law."
On the coffee table lays a book on
how to lose weight during sex. Another
elegant volume looks like it might contain
Ansel Adams's prints of Yosemite, but
inside are Mapplethorpe-like photos of
genitalia, Asian women doing their best
Deep Throat imitations, and naked people probing each other's
orifices in creative ways.
Finally, an ostensible leader of the gathering—a man named
Aubry with limp hair and an overbite—introduces himself and
announces the first game: mimicry. People pair off, and one
member of each pair has to immediately repeat everything the
other says. This, explains Aubry, "will help you focus attention
$2.50
on the other person and help you grow."
The starting phrase is: "The last time I
felt really free was..." For a minute or so
the room sounds like a Pentecostal church
meeting at full velocity.
Afterwards Aubry asks how people
liked it. A few hands go up. Who didn't
like it? A rather faded middle-aged
woman named Angela raises a hand, "I
thought it sucked," she says in a raspy
voice.
Aubry announces the rules for the
next game, "hot seat." The person so
designated must answer all questions, as
long as people raise their hands and say
thank you.
"Are you rich?" someone asks a
man who claims he took pictures of one
girl beside his Rolls Royce. "Not really," he says. "Depends what you consider rich."
Someone asks an athletic looking
man in a cutoff football jersey why he
broke up with his girlfriend. "She said I
was conceited, self-centered, and narcissistic," he explains, "but I'm really a
naturally loving and giving person."
"How big are your chest and biceps?" someone else asks. He has no
idea. Then someone asks about the size
of another appendage.
"Twenty-seven inches," he replies.
"Ouch!" says Angela, the faded
middle-aged woman who thought mimicry sucked and who, during the introductions, described herself as a
"swinger." Then Mr. Jock explains:
"Twenty-seven inches from the floor."
Turn to page 12
Lies, Damn Lies & Left-Wing Statistics
WHY JOANIE CAN'T ADD
by PAUL MULSHINE
Certain questions are hard to face
for us beleaguered white males. We
don't want to consider the real reason,
for instance, why women and
minorities do worse than we do on
standardized tests such as the SAT. We
hide behind the easy excuse: the test is
culturally biased. This is the easy way
out, and like most easy ways out, it is
not true. The test isn't biased. It is
mathematics itself that is biased.
Only in a male-dominated,
Eurocentric world would two plus two
always have to equal four. Always!
There's no room for discussion, no
area for compromise. Just the same
rigid answer, day after day. This is
exactly the sort of system you'd expect a white male to set up. Why, just
look at the number one! It's the very
first number men invented, and what's
it shaped like? All straight and rigid
and pointy like that? I rest my case.
Math is unfair. It's time we started to
raise consciousness about the need to
make mathematics more flexible. We
need to get rid of the ludicrous idea
' that there's just one "correct" answer
to every math problem. We need to
soften and, yes, feminize math.
This is, of course, a ludicrous
proposal, but if I were to write a book
on this theme under a female pen
name, perhaps with a picture of a
lesbian in a muumuu on the back
cover, I'd have a best-seller. Let's
face it: Women hate math. Not all
women, just the type of women who
end up as militant feminists and, for
that matter, the type of foggy-brained
males who support them. The book
I envision—let's title it "Divide
and Conquer: How Men Use Mathematics to Oppress Women"—
could actually perform a service
for all those closet arithmephobes
in the feminist movement. Until
now, radical feminists have had to
hide their hostility to math. Take
the famous Barbie incident. The
Mattel Toy Co. produced a talking
Barbie doll that said, among other
things, "Math class is tough!"
Feminists complained that this perpetuated an unfair stereotype of
women. Mattel promptly did to
Barbie what the Sandinistas used to
do to La Prensa. This led the executive director of the American
Association of University Women,
Turn to page 10
Dear Sirs,
With horror I realized my subscription had run its
course and I had been subsidized for the last couple of
copies. How American of me. With the enclosed cheek
I abdicate my position in the welfare state.
I read your publication from cover to cover but your
Communiques section is my favorite. The vitriolic vituperations of your non-admirers (does that make you
Admirer Impaired?) are quite funny. I still laugh about
the letter stained with the author's menstrual fluid.
In the vernacular of a few years ago, "Keep on keepin'
on."
Yours truly,
James F. Howell III
Dear Bigots,
Is this too PC for you? Your thinly disguised hatred
and intolerance are shameful. I use your paper (along with
quotes from Rush Limbaugh) in my critical thinking
classes. Thanks for providing me with good examples of
why we need legislation and PC language to protect us.
—unsigned
In the January issue of
Heterodoxy, you slandered
Nietzsche by asserting that
he was one of the intellectual godfathers of Communism and Nazism. In fact,
Nietzsche severely criticized socialism, antiSemitism and German nationalism. Here are two
quotations that demonstrate
this.
The first is from Human All Too Human, section 473 (1878):
"Socialism can serve
to teach, in a truly brutal
and impressive fashion,
what danger there lies in all
accumulations of state
power, and to that extent to
implant mistrust of the
state itself. When its harsh
voice takes up the
watchword 'as much state
as possible' it thereby at
first sounds noisier than
ever: but soon the
opposite cry through with
all the greater force: 'as
little state as possible.' "
The next quotation is
from The Gay Science, section 377 (1887):
"No, we do not love humanity; but on the other hand wing diatribes, you simply must keep my drug of
we are not nearly "German" enough, in the sense in which choice coming. Please!
the word "German" is constantly being used nowadays, to
For freedom,
advocate nationalism and race hatred and to be able to take
Richard Rider
pleasure in the national scabies of the heart and blood
poisoning that now leads the nations of Europe to delimit
and barricade themselves against each other as if it were a
matter of quarantine."
Your January 1994 issue carried a story and photos
Lawrence J. Tyburski
about Pasadena. Paragraph 11 of the story is inaccurate.
Dravosburg, PA
The creation of a Latino roundtable and the naming of
a Latino managing editor of the Pasadena Star-News
had nothing to do with the events described in paragraphs 7 through 9. I explained this to the writer twice
As the Libertarian Party candidate for governor of the before publication, but the story was still published,
(not so) great State of California, I find myself buried in inaccurately and out of context.
books, budgets and arcane publications that I simply must
This is a request for a correction to set the record
read to make me an effective spokesman for my party.
Unfortunately, I can't stop reading your publication as well.
Further, at least two of the photographs (see encloFrankly, I love your irreverent style and PC attacks. It's sure) are Star-News photos. Your publication did not
wonderful how you can make me laugh while at the same obtain permission from the Star-News to publish these
time increasing my disdain for the statists on the left. Lloyd photos, nor did you credit the newspaper.
Billingsley is my favorite columnist.
This is a formal request for you to set the record
Even though your investigations do not always directly straight on this matter.
fit into my political philosophy or deal with the fruitcake
Please advise me of your plans as soon as possible.
politics of my state, I find I devour each edition. Then each
Very truly yours,
issue gets recycled to my friends.
Hope Frazier
I can't spare the time to read Heterodoxy, but I can't
Editor/Vice President
live without my monthly fix. As my dealer in zany rightPasadena Star News
Editor's Note: We
obtained the photos in
question from a source
other than the Pasadena
Star-News and had no
intention of denying
Star photographers the
appropriate credit.
Thank you for your
fast service sending me
copies of your Tailhook
issue. I have a personal
interest in this story and
was pleased to see the
accusers shown up for
what they are.
I look forward to
every issue and am very
pleased with each one. I
am highly offended by
the screeching hysteria
of your critics—guess
you must be getting to
them. Keep it up.
I also wish to take
this opportunity to thank
an outstanding lady from
New York who pointed
me in your direction.
Keep hammering
the collectivist scum.
Sincerely,
Dave Bruton
REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM
NOTHING MORE THAN FEELINGS: The spring issue
of a strange, little-known magazine, Magical Blend, which
is steeped in mysticism, contains a strange article by none
other than Vice President Al Gore. Gore's essay, "The
Story of the Earth and Us," examines the tension between
the Platonic world-view, which emphasizes rationality,
and the Aristotelian world-view, which emphasizes feelings, and man's connectedness with nature. Gore, predictably, comes down on the side of feelings, and insists that
our high-tech Platonic society is careening toward an
apocalyptic collision with the natural world. "... We have
believed that a detached intellect could enable us to
understand nature and control it," he writes. "But we need
to feel as well as think...The scientific revolution seduced
us with false promises, with the idea that if we concentrated on the realm of the intellect we could
solve all our problems." Also featured in the
spring issue of Magical Blend is an article on
the distinct differences between male and female sorcerers, and one on lucid dreaming.
torial staff at The Wall Street Journal put it well: "There's
plenty else wrong with the J.M. Barrie play. Feminists
won't like it that Peter is guilty of gender bias by barring
girls from his Lost Boys Club and by relegating Wendy to
a mother role. And of course, the part of Wendy always
goes to an actress, which infects impressionable young
minds with the notion that being a boy is better than being
a girl. Those animal sequences are very troubling. Could
animal rights activists condone a play that depicts a dog
forced to work as a nanny or makes light of feeding an
alarm clock to a crocodile?
The school that killed Peter Pan is now considering
staging "The Wizard of Oz." Expect protests from the
vertically challenged."
GOING APE: In the February issue of the
popular science magazine, Discover, writer
Daniel W. McShea joins the growing chorus of
animal rightists who want to extend human
rights to apes. McShea notes that even though
apes are intelligent and are close kin to humans, some people will argue that humans are
somehow special, and deserve greater consideration. "To answer this," he writes, "I suggest a
different sort of argument than the one based on
intelligence and kinship. The argument for ape
rights is based on our concern for our own wellbeing, our own feelings...Apes have feelings, but
the case for protecting apes doesn't hinge on
the damage done to their feelings by
maltreatment. Rather it hinges on the damage
done to our feelings." To his credit, McShea
admits that there are problems ahead, such as
whether apes should have rights to property.
MY FUNNY VALENTINE: "Girls who love
girls and women who love women who love
women are OK!!!" On Valentine's Day, members of the Lesbian Avengers distributed that
message, attached to pieces of candy, to children between the ages of six and eleven years
old at Cowing Elementary School in West
Springfield, Massachusetts. The leaflets also
included an 800 number offering "hot, uncensored gay phone sex" at $1.98 per minute.
School officials threatened to sue but militant
sisters remained defiant. "I think it's pretty
clear that families and schools do not protect
their gay members," said novelist and Lesbian
Avengers founder Sarah Schulman, "so the lesbian com- THE COLOR OF PREJUDICE: A recent Louis Harris poll
munity has the responsibility to act like a family for gay
on racial and ethnic stereotypes in America turned up
and lesbian children.
some interesting data. The results, published in the Chicago Tribune, show that "prejudice knows no color," in the
SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE: In his best
words of Stanley Cloud, President of the National Conferselling novel, Disclosure, Michael Crichton has one of his ence of Christians and Jews. Hispanics consider blacks
characters deliver a rant we can only pray remains in the
inclined toward crime and violence, and a large number of
script of the film now being cast: "I'm telling you, it's blacks believe Hispanics lack the drive to succeed and
all bullshit. Like these sensitivity training seminars we
consider Asians unscrupulously crafty and devious in
all have to go to. Everybody sits there with their hands in business. When presented with the statement that Roman
their laps like a fucking Red Guard meeting, learning
Catholics "are narrow minded because they are too conthe correct way to address your fellow workers. But trolled by their church," for instance, 57% of non-Catholic
afterward everybody goes out and fucks around, the
Asian Americans and 49% of non-Catholic blacks agreed,
same as they always did. The assistants go, 'Oh, Mr. as opposed to 34% of non-Catholic whites. When given the
Jackson have you been to the gym? You look so strong.'
statement, "When it comes to choosing between people and
Batting their eyelashes. So what am I supposed to do? money, Jews will choose money," 54% of blacks agreed,
You can't make rules about this. People get hungry, they along with 43% of Hispanics and 34% of Asian Americans,
eat. Doesn't matter how many meetings they attend. This while only 27% of non-Jewish whites signed on. Prejudice
is all a giant jerk off. And anybody who buys into it is an is indeed a growth industry in America, but not, apparently,
asshole."
in the white community.
NEVER NEVER LAND: The principal and superintendent of a Long Island intermediate school cancelled a
children's performance of "Peter Pan" this month because
the local Shinnecock Indians might find it offensive,
particularly the song "Uhga-Wuhga-Meatball." The edi-
OLLIE UBER ALLES: Oliver Stone, whose ongoing antiAmericanism bears some striking similarities to the mindless thumping of the Energizer Bunny, has a new one on
the drawing boards. It is a movie called "Noreiga," with
Al Pacino in the title role. The view of the Panamanian
dictator will be "somewhat sympathetic." (The writer on
the film, Lawrence Wright, says, "This is a film about
Noriega's spiritual journey.") But if the former dictator of
Panama can't provide an example of evil for Ollie, American government certainly can. The movie has a sub-plot
about Iran-Contra with real bad guys: George Bush and
Oliver North.
NO BULL FROM MJ: As the Chicago Bulls suffer through
a lackluster season without Michael Jordan, the team's
new go-to-guy, Scottie Pippen, got annoyed at the fans'
booing and accused them of racism, asserting that they had
never booed a white player. Asked for a response, Air
Jordan slam dunked Pippen, saying that there had been
vicious booing of white players during his time on the
team: "I know this about Chicago Stadium.
The fans want to see good, solid basketball, and if
they don't see it, they're going to boo. It
doesn't matter what color you are, whether
you're black or white or yellow."
THEY JUST DON'T GET IT: Khalid Abdul
Muhammed, foul-mouthed official of the Nation
of Islam, is the Typhoid Mary of black racism,
spreading it wherever he goes. Just recently,
after the opera bouffe in which Louis Farrakhan
pretended to disciple him, Khalid appeared at
Howard University. His comments were
relatively mild, considering what he had said at
New Jersey's Kean University several weeks
ago, but his mere presence ignited racism in
others. During Khalid's appearance, a student
named Malik Zulu Shabazz got up and led the
audience in this call and response:
Who killed Nat Turner?
The Jews!
Who controls the Federal Reserve?
The Jews!
University administrators did not discipline
Shabazz, which is laudable. But at least they
could have given the foolish young man some
ridicule, a corrective he badly needs.
GAY FOR VIEW: Gay and lesbian shows are
turning up on cable TV. There is also Gay
Entertainment Television, a New York-based
channel dedicated to gay and lesbian programming which is now carried in five major cities.
Our correspondent Turk Richards has come up
with a way of putting a "gay slant" on classic
straight T.V. programs:
DICKIE VAN DYKE-Laura Petrie has
been outed as a lesbian; she leaves Rob and her
son Ritchie to become the domestic partner of
Sally Rodgers. Rob questions his own sexual
identity and has a brief affair with Buddy Sorrel, who
quickly decides that bisexuality is not for him and returns
to his faithful wife Pickles.
BRIDGIT LOVES BRIDGIT: Two women from
the upper East Side, Bridgit Sullivan and Bridgit Ginsberg
meet while on vacation at Fire Island. They fall in love, but
find that their in-laws just can't accept having a "mixed
marriage" between a Jew and a Shiksa.
BARNEY—A children's show starring Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, and his former love,
prostitute Steven Gobbi. To introduce youngsters to
"diverse" relationships, the two men open each show in
purple face (after sexual asphyxia) and sing a duet of "I
Love You, You Love Me."
STUDDS—Starring the other gay Congressman
from Massachusetts. Gerry treats young House members
like he's reading a John Grisham novel as he rapidly moves
from page to page.
DRAGNET—Joe Friday and Officer Gannon go
undercover in spiked heels, garter belts and plunging
necklines to catch a serial killer preying on prostitutes.
QUEEN FOR A DAY—Each afternoon, three
transvestites tell their tragic stories to a live audience
while competing for prizes.
PAGE 4
MARCH 1994
Notes of a Sensitivity Training Survivor
By CRAIG T. COBANE II
W
hen I was informed I had been awarded
a Graduate Teaching Assistantship in
Political Science, I was pleased. But
then I read further in the letter and found that part
of the requirement of the award was attendance at
a "Teaching Effectiveness Workshop." This made
my heart fall, especially when I read the sentence
in the letter (which was signed by the University
of Cincinnati's Associate Vice President for Research and Advanced Studies, Dr. Judith S. Trent) that read: "Attendance at the Workshop is mandatory
as a part of your assistantship requirement."
I immediately recalled my first work
experience at the University of Cincinnati a
couple of years earlier. I had been appointed as a
Residence Hall Staff Member. This position too
required a mandatory "workshop,"
although in that case it had been billed as a
Cultural Diversity Session.
Just prior to my Residence Hall sensitivity
session (which was held, incidentally, during
my very first week on the U.C. campus),
returning staff members had given me warnings I didn't quite understand at the time,
telling me, "Be careful what you say" and
"The thing is to keep your mouth shut." I
became concerned enough to approach the
Residence Hall Supervisor. In the course of
our conversation, I told him that I was new to
the university, and that the university I had
attended as an undergraduate had very few
minority students. The supervisor was very
eager to hear my concerns and prodded me for
more information about my lack of experience
with cultural diversity. As part of our talk, I
also discussed the emotionally draining experience of my father's recent death, a mistake I
would later regret.
The Residence Hall Sensitivity Session
began with a "sensitivity facilitator" informing
us that all whites were racists and that blacks
could not in any circumstances be racist. This
black woman stated that white men held all
power in society and that they oppressed
everyone—ethnic minorities, women, homosexuals and
the handicapped. Furthermore, she said that the English
language, chief weapon of white males, was itself
constructed in a manner which makes it oppressive. Anecdotal evidence provided to prove this assertion included
phrases such as "good guys wear white, bad guys wear
black" and "stuck behind the eight-ball." Additionally, she
heavily emphasized terms such as "black-market," "blacklisted," "black sheep" and "blackmail." The facilitator was
particularly venomous about "blackmail," because in her
bewildering words, "Not only does it attack and denigrate
blacks, it also specifies 'black males.' "
After her introductory rant, the facilitator divided
the participants into two groups by reading their names off
a prepared sheet. My group included a white male, "Boris,"
who was about 7 years older; "Hilda," a self-avowed
feminist; "Tracy," a very outspoken "Afro-centrist"
woman; and "Thurman," a black male, who like myself
was new to the department. The other group included two
white males (both had several years of experience in this
department and tended to be passive), two white women
(one very outspoken and the other very submissive) and a
black male who did not stay for the whole session.
As the facilitator read off the list of names, she kept
looking up at us to associate names with faces. It was
obvious upon reflection that she had arranged the groups
to provide the object lesson she intended to enforce.
After dividing us up, the facilitator produced something I had not seen since I was about four years old:
Tinker Toys. She gave a bag of them to each group and
said we were going to play a "game." The rules were
simple: the two groups would have 15 minutes to use the
Tinker Toys to build the tallest possible freestanding structure. After completing our Tinker Toy structure, we were
then to disassemble it entirely and rebuild it, this time
without any verbal communication.
Before we started our group mapped out a strategy:
while we were building the structure during the period in
which conversation was allowed, one of the members
would draw a sketch of it with directions of how we built
it for use during the silent portion of the exercise. Someone asked jokingly who could draw and Hilda volunteered.
When we started, my group was sitting at a table
which was obviously far too wobbly to support our project.
Boris suggested that we move it onto the floor and I agreed.
Hilda did not like the idea and said that we were taking the
game way too seriously. The two black students made it
clear that they could have cared less what we did.
It was soon obvious that only Boris and I were
working on the structure. The others showed no interest
whatsoever, remaining at the wobbly table and looking
down condescendingly. When I asked if the rest of the
group was going to help, Hilda looked up from her little
Tinker Toy sketch and sneered, "let the boys play with
their toys."
Throughout the endeavor, whenever Boris and I had
a disagreement over construction, it always turned out that
Boris's idea was superior. (Civil engineering is not my
strong point.) Despite the lack of involvement from the
rest of the group, however, other than periodic taunts, our
structure was built with several minutes to spare. As Boris
and I examined the structure, we noticed that near the top
we had placed heavier pieces on top of lighter pieces. Boris
stated that this would have to be corrected in the final
structure.
When the facilitator told us to take the structure apart
and prepare to build it again in silence, I suggested that
Boris should be the leader because he obviously knew the
most about the structure. As the second part of the
game began, Boris and I worked in silence. Our memories
of what we had done were good enough that we did not
need to refer back to Hilda's sketch. She watched without
much interest until we reached the top of the structure
(where the mistake had been) and started to
make the correction we had planned. At this
point we heard an urgent knocking on the table.
It was Hilda glaring disapprovingly at us and
agitatedly pointing at her drawing. Observing
the rule of silence, Boris attempted to explain
why we had improvised by holding the two
Tinker Toy pieces in each hand, and then
lowering one hand and raising the other like a
balance to show that one piece was heavier
than the other. I don't know if Hilda ever did
understand what Boris was trying to get across,
but she did get very angry and crumpled up the
drawing and threw it at his face.
After our structure was built, I went over
to look at the other group's structure, and it was
obvious that with the time remaining there was
no way that group could build a structure as tall
as ours. We were going to win the Tinker Toy
contest! With a gesture of exaggerated exaltation, I flashed Boris a triumphant smile and
gave a theatrical "thumbs up."
When the game was over, the facilitator
told us all to return to our seats, further emphasizing the kindergarten atmosphere of the session. She immediately turned to me and asked,
"Why are you so happy?" I replied that I was
happy because my group had won—our structure was taller. She stated coldly that comparing our structure to that of the other group was
not part of the exercise. I responded that there
was competition implied in the way she set up
the exercise. She stated that white males see
everything as competition and their only goal is
to win at any cost.
The facilitator continued to attack me for
my pride in having a taller structure. She berated me bitterly for not having made a special
effort to include the rest of the group. When I explained
that I had tried to get the others in my group to participate
but they showed no interest, she interrupted me and said
that she did notice my "halfhearted" and "condescending"
attempt at getting the nonwhite males in my group to
participate—and it wasn't good enough. As she noticed
my dumbfounded look, she further explained that it is not
the oppressed individual's responsibility to become
involved, but that it is the oppressor's responsibility to see
to the needs of the oppressed.
To demonstrate that I personified the oppressive
white male, she began to read from notes she had taken
while we built the structures and to pose a series of
rhetorical questions to the nonwhite males in the session.
"How did you feel when the two white males took the
structure away from the rest of the group and went to work
on it by themselves?" It was typical, the facilitator said,
for white males to segregate and exclude other people
from "their" projects. "How did you feel when it was
obvious that Craig would only listen to Boris and to no one
else?" The facilitator then went on to say that young white
males are socialized to listen only to older white males.
They learn that in the patriarchal family structures.
"How did you feel when Craig made Boris the
leader of the group without considering anyone else or
even discussing the idea with anyone else?" In the white
male culture, she stated, only white males can be leaders,
HETERODOXY
PAGE 5
so it was only natural that I would consider only Boris
qualified for leadership. "How did you feel, Hilda, when
you tried to point out that the structure was not being built
according to 'the plan' and the two white males just ignored
you?" Again, the sensitivity facilitator explained that it was
normal for white men to discount the ideas and experience
of women and minorities or to place them in positions
having little power. It was noteworthy that the white males
in the group had delegated the secretarial role to the white
woman in the group and did not think the two black
members worthy of being assigned any task at all.
It was all quite absurd, but I couldn't help trying to
explain myself. As I tried to talk, the facilitator kept me
from finishing my sentences. She continued to single me
out and make references to my past, especially the thenrecent death of my father, facts she could only have known
if she had been prepped by my Residence Hall Supervisor.
At one point, the facilitator invited me to "touch her arm"
so I would have the experience of physically contacting a
black person. "You do come from an all-white school, don't
you?" she taunted. The session descended to its lowest point
when she called my deceased father a racist. She made
reference to the fact that the death of my father "removed
one more racist influence" from my life and stressed the
need to "un-teach" all the racist views my family and
especially my father had instilled in me. The death of my
father, according to her, was not such a bad thing because
it made her job of "sensitizing" me easier. I was able to
keep my composure throughout the session, but afterwards
I broke down.
I
could not keep the memories of this experience out
of my mind as I contemplated the new sensitivity
session I would face in becoming a teaching
assistant. As I would discover, my wariness over the
Graduate Teaching Effectiveness Workshop was well
founded.
One of the most intimidating sessions of the day was
entitled "University: Race and Gender—More than Words
on Paper." Speaking on behalf of the university, an associate dean of the law school informed me that "some acts are
harmful and hurtful even if not illegal." Then the university spokeswoman relayed the following as examples of
discriminatory behavior: "dumb blonde jokes" (to be viewed
as sex discrimination); calling only on women students in
class discussions (because of the intimidation of being
singled out); and calling only on white students. There was
also (even more subjectively) "not properly reacting to
students' answers," which could be seen in a graduate
assistant whose reactions included "looking out the window" and "pacing away from the student." These types of
"discrimination," according to the law school spokeswoman, sent students "the message of hurt and pain."
Another session at the workshop took up the issue of
"Appreciating Gender Differences." I was informed that
there were many unfounded stereotypes about men and
women, among them that men do better in math, are more
competitive and are often chosen as leaders in group work,
whereas women suffer from "math anxiety" and "favor
less competitive classroom projects." Furthermore, I was
told that debating is "a male-oriented teaching style" that
functions to "give advantage to some." On the basis of
these "facts," I was told that I had an obligation to produce
"a class where everyone feels comfortable" that was
without "white male bias."
The topic of yet another session was "Cultural Diversity in Teaching." A sizable portion of this session had to
do with learning to say "hello" in Swahili, learning to
shake hands like a black man, the importance of having
our minds and bodies "purified" and getting us to agree
that it was "important not to play with words." Nearly
paralyzed by the irony of that last exhortation, I could only
admit it was my sentiment exactly.
Another session I was required to attend centered on
"Feminist Issues in Teaching and Learning." During this
session I was informed that "higher education, among
other things, is sexist and racist," and that "education is
aimed at boys" because "boys are number one." I was also
told that "objectivity" is a "non-interactive male value."
One of the facilitators in this session then described how
she was a "survivor" of the educational system, invoking
parallels to being a rape survivor. She stressed to the
females in the session the importance of "building an
underground support group." While conceding the difficulty of graduate school, I had trouble believing it bore
any resemblance to rape or to living in Nazi-occupied
France.
D
uring this session I was also told that in American
society you are "privileged if you have a penis,"
that "being white no matter how talented gives
you an advantage." When a woman in the audience
bravely objected to these assertions, saying that she had
white male friends who had been turned down for jobs in
favor of women, she was jeered and ridiculed by the
session leaders, who said she "had been trained well" by
the white male system.
I left this session feeling drained. Although I felt
abused, I did not know how to describe the experience—
to myself or to others—until a while later when I saw the
resolution of a hostage crisis situation on television. As
I watched the faces of the relieved hostages emerging from
the small office building where they had been held against
their will by a ranting madman, I felt an immediate
kinship. I know exactly how you feel, I thought to myself.
CRAIG T. COBANE II is a doctoral student in
political science at the University of Cincinnati. A
different version of this article appeared in
Campus.
PAGE 6
MARCH 1994
SOMETHING FISHY:
Stanley Walks the Cutting Edge
A
dark Prince of the English department at
Duke University has brought his limpid
literary powers to bear in the defense of
multiculturalism, affirmative action, feminism,
gay rights and ethnic studies; but the great Army
of Indignation to which Stanley Fish now offers
his allegiance has already triumphed
wherever it has taken the field.
Leaping superbly to the canon's
mouth, Fish runs the unaccustomed risk
of seeming to leap too late. It is no
surprise, then, that the elegant essays
that result are informed, they are often
sanctified, by an appeal to large but
somewhat anachronistic philosophical
principles. In his acquired sympathies,
Stanley Fish is of the camp given over to
what he calls "the interpretive turn," a
maneuver undertaken by theorists committed to the thesis that far from being
langauge subordinate to a world of
facts, it is language that brings facts into
being. Those troubled by the turn, Fish
acknowledges, take it to imply that
"words have no intrinsic meaning,
values are relative, rationality is a social
construct, everything is political, every
reading is a misreading" and argue by
contraposition that the interpretive turn
is a mistake, indeed, a ghastly blunder.
Fish accepts the inference but revels in
its conclusions, regarding them as
commonplaces. "There is no such thing
as literal meaning," he buoyantly affirms (italics, mine), "a meaning that
because it is prior to interpretation can
serve as a constraint on interpretation."
But what Fish writes in the course of
denying the existence of literal meaning
is meaningful in English and not in
Farsi, a circumstance that might suggest
constraints on interpretation of precisely
the sort that Fish thinks nonexistent; by
now the point is well known, if not well
taken, and from time to time Fish himself (or a sinister impostor) appears in
the English literary journals, arguing brightly that
on this matter what he said he did not mean and
what he meant he did not say.
Skepticism over the philosophical Fish thus starts
early; it never flags. If literal meanings go in one essay,
"transcendent" truths disappear in another. Whatever they
are, those truths, "[they] would not speak to any particular
condition, or be identified with any historical production,
or be formulated in terms of any ethnic, racial, economic
or class traditions," and lacking these identifying caste
marks they would be humanly (but not divinely) inaccessible. Yet if there are no transcendent truths, there are
nonetheless transcendent statements—those that fail to
mention history, class, race and gender—and of these there
are many: Fish's book is full of them, and it is only the fact
that they are false that robs these transcendent statements
of their role as transcendent truths; but if they are false,
their negations are true and thus one and the same argument successfully affirms what it was intended to deny.
If Fish is wrong about the transcendent truths, he is
wrong again about truths that are not transcendent. "The
truths any of us find compelling," he writes, "will all be
by DAVID BERLINSKI
partial, which is to say they will all be political." This is a
thesis yet advocated ardently by the low-browed faithful at
Mongahela Community College; elsewhere Fish's line is
apt to elicit only a few inordinately polite murmurs of
assent. And for obvious reasons. I, for one, am completely
compelled by the truth that tin is softer than molybdenum,
and while this is only a part of the truth about tin, it is not
necessarily a partial truth, the very form of words suggesting incoherently that a particular truth might, like a Chevrolet
Camaro, be broken down into parts, and not even partially
a political truth if the political and metallurgical truths are
in any reasonable sense distinct. Fish's animadversions on
transcendence thus constitute a clean sweep, with every
argument invalid, every premise false.
Essentialism represents another tempting but dangerous target. "The essential," Fish affirms in his preface, "is a
rhetorical category whose shape varies with the contingencies of history and circumstance." Confidence in this
familiar declaration, another Mongahela lunchroom staple,
does not survive a confrontation with examples, as when
one says that the noble and lovely thing answering to the
name of Stanley might have been a lawyer rather than a
literary critic, but not that he might have been a seal rather
than a man, some essential part of what it is to be Stanley
having been irretrievably and thus poignantly lost were he
to emerge dripping from the waves, sleek fur receding over
a phocine head. This judgment appears to owe little either
to the contingencies of history or circumstance. Might Fish
have been a seal in another time or place? Under other
circumstances? It is again a contingent fact that cats do not
have pink fur and lack the capacity to crochet sweaters or
play the oboe, but not a contingent fact that cats are
mammals rather than reptiles or amphibians; it is a part of
the essence of literary criticism that it is not dentistry.
Whatever a critic's position on essentialism, and the
issue is yet vexed and has long been vexed, the
distinctions embodied by these commonly made
and intuitively plausible judgments need either
to be enforced or, if rejected, explained
convincingly as artifacts. This Fish does not do.
Atheistic on essences, Fish is radical on
epistemology, arguing in the course of the otherwise sensible "Being Interdisciplinary is So
Very Hard to Do" that "knowledge...cannot
grasp, or name the grounds of, its possibility,
and whenever it thinks to have done so, those
grounds are elsewhere than they seem to be...,"
an affirmation calling to mind nothing so much
as a fraternity brother's astonished discovery
that try as he might he can never catch sight of
his own well upholstered rear end, it swiveling
as he swivels and all. If the objects of knowledge are propositions, the grounds of any proposition constitute, on one reading of Fish's assertion, the set of propositions necessary, but not
necessarily sufficient, for its truth. The thesis of
radical epistemology, then, is that one could
never know on pain of infinite regress the set of
sentences necessary for every sentence that one
knows. This thesis is true so long as no sentence is
necessary for itself, which is to say not obviously
true at all; and indeed, if the truths are taken to
be points in the closed unit ball in Euclidean nspace (and grounds expressed by continuous
functions), demonstrably false by Brower's
fixed point theorem, the argument too obvious to
bear repeating.
Epistemology is not a strong subject for
Fish; but then again neither is ontology or metaphysics. Writing in the book's introduction about
the difference between the sociology of science
and science itself, he proposes to let incompatible
doctrines, like sleeping dogs live where they lie:
"Acting scientifically means acting on the assumption of a determinate nature waiting to be
described by a neutral observation language;
acting sociologically means acting on the assumption that nature is socially constructed by
the very speech acts of which it is supposedly the
cause." Expatiating on this theme, Fish remarks
that it "is no longer taken for granted," and surely
not taken for granted by him, that "molecules and
quarks come first" in the scheme of things, "and
scientists' models of molecules and quarks come second."
These theses taken literally, it follows that as far as
sociologists of science are concerned, a speech act could
bring an elephant into existence (Arise, Dumbo); and that
molecules (and so the materials they compose) did not exist
before the molecular theory of matter—the Cathedral at
Chartres thus acquiring, in Fish's account, its molecular
structure eight hundred years after its construction. This is
not an intellectual position calculated to inspire
confidence.
It is Fish's plangent conviction that an older, insufficiently flexible generation of scholars has rejected the
interpretative turn because it is unfamiliar; he is sympathetic to their plight: "One cannot blame those who
entered the academy thirty years ago for feeling
discombobulated and dispossessed by developments they
could not possibly have predicted..." The cover photograph on his book persuades me that if Fish is not middleaged he is at least a man of certain years, and if he has
managed to retain the intellectual suppleness necessary for
a fine appreciation of the interpretive turn it cannot be age
alone that keeps the rest of us scoffing on the sidelines.
HETERODOXY
I
n the title essay of his collection, "There is No Such
Thing as Free Speech... and It's a Good Thing, Too,"
the socially engaged Fish forsakes philosophy in order
to argue suavely that it might in some circumstances be a
good idea to shut some people up. Who would argue? But
those whom Fish wishes to silence I am prepared
hoarsely to urge on from the sidelines; those that he
encourages I would see silenced as so many public
nuisances. Controversy over cases inevitably remains,
prompting the corro-sive suspicion that if there is no
agreement on who is to be silenced, it might be the better
part of wisdom to leave off silencing anyone.
The traditional defense of freedom of speech,
Fish believes, rests on a flabby and insupportable
distinction between speech and action. A distinction
denied is a distinction discarded and if speech is a
species of action it falls, it must fall, under the scope of
rules or regulations, speech crime arising at the busy
intersection of a public prohibition and a provocative
utterance. It is, of course, trivially true that what a man
says is a part of what he does. Contracts are created, hearts
are broken, and marriages are made on the strength of
what is said, and Fish's efforts to suggest that he is alone
in perceiving this elementary fact engender a false air of
Fish v. Foul, et. al. Investing speech with the attributes
of action is yet compatible with the observation that,
like snow upon the desert's dusty face, much that a
man says falls quite without effect. Still, if some things
are said without effect, others plainly are not; the law
recognizes libel, slander and blackmail, and common
sense recognizes as well what Fish earnestly affirms,
namely that "speech-related injuries may be grievous and
deeply wounding," even if as offense taken multiplies
on every university campus the objective evidence for
offense given tends to dwindle and then disappear.
Cases remains in which offense is both given and
taken.
No set of specific rules, Fish admits, can inform
the deliberations of campus censors addressing racist,
sexist and homophobic speech, but Fish is well
disposed in general to a principle of expected utility
expressed succinctly by Judge Learned Hand: "[A]sk
whether the gravity of the 'evil' discounted by its
improbability justifies such invasion of free speech as
is necessary to avoid the danger" (U.S. v. Dennis,
183/. 2d 212).
As a principle I see no way to fault this. Who
would argue for the imposition of a likely evil,
especially one grave? But Justice Hand is appealing to
a dangerous evil and Fish to speech-related injuries,
and however galling it may be for people of color to be
called colored people, the imposition of the epithet
hardly jeopardizes the distinction between two quite
different categories of sin. The principle of expected
utility is in any event too strong to do Fish much good,
going as it does beyond what is false inadvertently to
proscribe and then purge what is true. There are, after
all, plenty of statements that it would be better for
humanity never to have uttered or having uttered
never to have heard. E=MC2 comes readily to mind;
that, and in view of the cholesterol count of the dish that
results, the recipe for fettucine Alfredo. I leave the
development of this argument as an exercise; the real
troubles for Fish lie elsewhere.
The concept of a speech crime suggests something like a
rule of three specificities: no speech crime without a
specific baleful effect, of course, but also no speech
crime not tied to a specific circumstance of utterance and
a specific form of words. Absent the effects and there is
nothing to talk of; absent the specific form of words and
there is no speech crime, the misdeed mournfully indistinct, passing from something hard-edged and glittering
to a crime marked as a crime only by the circumstance
that an offense has been conveyed by words. What is
streng verboten, campus speech codes must affirm, is
saying—there follow the forbidden words, sentences,
tracts or theories, the specific sentence, for example,
that women are low sloppy beasts. But absent the
specific circumstance of utterance and there is no speech
crime, the charge lapsing, for example, if I merely
mention but do not use specific forbidden words, as Fish
himself does on p. 111, or if I deny publicly that women
are low sloppy beasts, or if I doubt that they are, or if I
speculate that they are, or if I accept for the purposes of
argument that they are—only assertion, avowal or declaration carrying the requisite intentional commitment
necessary to bring about a crime. But as the
circumstances of utterance are fixed, specificity in the form
of words unavoidably disappears. Attitudes such as assertion,
avowal or declaration take propositional objects, something
indicated by their gram-.
PAGE 7
mar as forms of indirect discourse, and propositions are
constitutionally dissociated from any specific choice of
words used to express them. I may thus affirm that women
are low sloppy beasts without ever once using those very
words, as when I express the thought in French or in Swahili, or
when overhearing Fish—of all people!—indecorously
affirm that women are low sloppy beasts, I agree publicly
with him, or murmur "Attaboy Stanley," or say simply
"Way to go Chucklenuts," this imaginary case altogether too
close for comfort to cases that have already passed into the
personal scrapbook of proud campus censors. Conveying
the thought that women are low sloppy beasts by using the
words "Way to go Chucklenuts," I may well induce "speechrelated injuries" that are both "grievous and deeply wounding," my offense the more vexing in virtue of its obliqueness.
The requirement that words be used assertively means
that uttering a specific form of words on a particular occasion is never sufficient for the charge of speech crime. The
argument just given implies that uttering a specific form of
words on a particular occasion is never necessary for speech
crime either. And if uttering a specific form of words is
neither necessary nor sufficient for speech crime, it is hard
to see that any independent content remains to the concept,
speech crime appearing inevitably as an aspect of thought
crime, a fact long known to censors and tyrants alike.
I
each year. Strong illness, strong remedy,as Fish might say,
as Fish in fact does say in defending affirmative action;
but if Fish would scruple at such injustice, it is hard to see
that he would have any better defense than the one he
derides in the case of affirmative action, namely than two
wrongs don't make a right. There are principles that,
indeed, one gives up at one's peril.
The inclusion of affirmative action in "a plan to
achieve social equality" points Fish toward the badlands
that lie beyond any remedial scheme, social equality
functioning in his text as a coded description of a society
in which rewards are distributed by means of a spoils
system, one based on skin color and gender. But if 15
percent of the mathematical physicists at the Institute for
Advanced Study must be black and 50 percent women,
skill in solving differential equations will not by itself
remain a standard of merit and so a criterion for advancement in that institution. To his credit, Fish is sensitive to
this point. Raising the possibility early on that "merit...
itself [may be] a contested category," Fish himself contests
it cheerfully later on, arguing that inasmuch as "diversity
will be an important factor in the educational experience,"
race must count for something. What holds for blacks,
holds again for women; but unlike blacks, who need to
achieve minimum scores to pass muster in race norming at
Berkeley, merely the "very presence" of women in a
department, of say, microbiology, Fish believes, "makes a
difference," and although he does not say what kind of
difference it is apt to be, he is in favor of the result.
The thesis that Fish embraces with some residual
diffidence, others endorse with a hearty, vulgar sense they
have seen the high ground and propose to command it.
"The world is changing, higher education is changing, our
definitions of quality are changing," the ignorant and
abysmal Ralph Wolff, director of the Western Association
of Schools and Colleges accrediting commission, boisterously affirmed in a recent edition of The San Francisco
Chronicle (February 24, 1994); contrary to Fish's view
that professors of English carry little influence in the world
at large, doctrines that arise in departmental colloquia
often survive to become principles of practical dogma.
But the policy that Fish commends carries consequences that he might otherwise deplore. Blacks entering
the freshman class at the University of California as the
beneficiaries of affirmative action leave some years later
as its victims, the standard of merit by which they gained
admission suspended at some point between their introduction to the Afro-American Experience and their introduction to the Calculus, diversity appearing to everyone
but affirmative action officials as little more than a cruel
and pointless jest. This bitter truth is widely known; it is
not widely acknowledged.
The divided Fish is a discordant Fish. Not only are
the conceptions of affirmative action that he contemplates
different, they are incompatible, diversity working against
remedial relief and remedial relief inconsistent with diver
sity. If diversity is an end in itself there is no reason to
exclude from consideration mesomorphs, those who lisp,
Hakkas, the congenitally retarded, men who are lefthanded, women under five feet in height, the
morbidly obese, hemorrhoid sufferers, Swiss Chinese
lesbians—there are more minorities than members in any
society and so as the demand for diversity grows, places
available to satisfy that demand must dwindle; but if
every minority is entitled to some representational share
of the spoils, diversity cannot be a remedy to the black
community for the particular injustices they are said to
have suffered. Rights are general; remedies are not, and
in the face of a declaration of diversity, members of the
black community may well ask what's in it for us. On the
other hand, if affirmative action entitles the black com
munity to a specific, a remedial, share of the spoils, some
aspect of diversity as a social program must inevitably be
compromised, since one portion of the available spoils
will be set aside irremovably for one minority in virtue of
what they have suffered and not in virtue of who they are.
This is a dilemma sensed by many representatives of the
black community; when proposals are made to diversify
the college campus, their response is often a very tepid
grunt of painfully formal enthusiasm.
t is in "Reverse Racism," that Fish comes to the defense
of affirmative action, a cause that evokes his assent in
proportion, one might suspect, to the extent that it has
never seriously jeopardized his career. To the objection that
affirmative action is reprehensible because racist, and racist
because based on color, Fish responds that a racist policy
and a "policy designed to remedy that plight" are not, after
all, the same thing, an assertion trivially true, skeptics will
observe, in view of the fact that they have just been described
as having different aims.
But differing in their aims, apartheid and affirmative
action may nonetheless be alike in appealing to reprehen
sible means. To point out the mistake is to see a variant
promptly embodied. "Reverse racism," Fish writes, "is a
cogent description of affirmative action only if one consid
ers the virus of racism to be morally and medically indis
tinguishable from the remedy we apply to it." But racism
and its remedies may well differ in any number of respects,
the good intentions of those urging the remedies on racists
the most obvious; it yet remains true that reverse racism is
a cogent, an inescapable, description of affirmative action,
Fish's assertion falling to an invocation of modus tollendo
tollens.
;
A larger issue entirely infects Fish's argument. Is
affirmative action to be simply a remedy for past injustice,
nothing more? Fish is uncertain, his prose becoming inky at
a crucial point: "[I]t is a travesty of reasoning," he writes, "to
argue that affirmative action, which gives preferential treatment to disadvantaged minorities as part of a plan to achieve
social equality, is no different from the policies that created
the disadvantages in the first place." The pairing of preferential treatment and disadvantaged minorities resurrects a
remedial conception of affirmative action, one that issues in
a familiar and explicit recommendation: that those who have
been injured by an evil social policy should be compensated
by the society that has injured them. The objection to
affirmative action thus described is well known: extending
rewards on the basis of race, affirmative action benefits
some who have not been directly injured by an evil social
policy and punishes others who have not directly benefited
from an evil social policy. It is unfair, and as time goes on it
becomes progressively more unfair, tending in the university environment to acquire the frank aspect of a racket.
Affirmative action thus collides with the ancestral
moral doctrine that two wrongs do not make a right, a
collision that evokes no sympathy whatsoever from Fish,
who champions the contrary doctrine of compensatory
injustice. "[T]he word unfair" Fish writes, "is hardly an
adequate description of [the black] experience." If unfairness is inadequate as an adjective, then fairness, Fish
reasons, "as a resolution no longer to discriminate against
[blacks] legally is hardly an adequate remedy." But the fact
that fairness is insufficient as a remedy hardly implies that
it is not necessary, Fish's conclusion to the contrary constituting a textbook example of a non sequitur. And this, the
charge of unfairness, is of course the gravamen of the case against In "The Common Touch or One Size Fits All,'' an essay
devoted to the much contested canon of great books,
affirmative action. It would no doubt provide a
Fish comes to the defense of "those for whom mattersof
salutary shock for those infected or afflicted by the residue
class, race, ethnicity and gender are of paramount
of racism were a few white men flogged and then lynched
PAGE 8
MARCH 1994
importance and abiding concern, that is, those who are
poor, black, Hispanic, Asian, female, gay, etc." Without his
advocacy, Fish is persuaded, class, race, ethnicity and
gender may for a moment go unmentioned, a prospect for
those familiar with the shape of campus controversies that
will seem richly preposterous. And as for those who are
poor, black, Hispanic, Asian, female and gay, their endless
geschrei fills the academic presses and campus podiums,
striking evidence, if any were needed, that whatever attempts may have been made to exclude these groups from
discourse have been tragically unsuccessful.
The position that Fish advocates on the
canon is at odds somewhat with his practice,
which reveals, as he himself is the first to admit,
that whatever the outcome of the debate, he at
any rate is not going to get caught teaching
feminist hermeneutics to walnut-eyed women
or spending time reading from the works of
various Third World worthies. Nonetheless,
Fish is provoked beyond measure by appeals to
common grounds in the humanities, by appeals
to common anything. "Someone who says to
you," he writes, the froth of indignation on his
lips, " 'This is our common ground,' "is really
saying, 'This is my common ground, the substratum of assumptions and values that produces my judgment, and it should be yours,
too.' " Addressing essays by Lynn Cheney and
George Steiner, and by extension Alan Bloom,
Chester Finn, William Bennett and many others, Fish is persuaded that the demand for an
uncorrupted canon "reflects [nothing more than]
the authoritative imposition of one group's
very particular tastes in the name of the common and the transcendental." But the categories of the common and the transcendental
appear in this quotation algebraically to cancel
one another. The burden of Fish's objurgations is
carried by his adopted indignation that somewhere, someone's tastes are being imposed on
others.
What results is a curiously self-defeating
hunchbacked argument. If the disagreement
over the canon is genuine, it cannot be a matter
of taste. Taste causes preferences and preferences may be different without revealing disagreement, the fact that I may prefer Milton to
Maya Angelou compatible with the fact that
others may prefer Maya Angelou to Milton. If
the disagreement is not a matter of taste, then it
must be a matter of judgment. But if judgments
are in conflict, they cannot all be true on the
grounds that if inconsistent truths may be upheld by different groups they are not inconsistent. Now either judgments
are compelling or they are not. It would seem that everyone
party to the dispute over the canon is compelled by his or
her version of the truth. "No one in the field," Fish pointedly reminds us, "is aligning himself with falsities." But
"when the present shape of truth is compelling beyond a
reasonable doubt," Fish adds, "it is our moral obligation to
act on it and not to defer action in the name of an interpretive future that may never arrive" (my own zestful italics).
To act on a judgment is to urge it vigorously on others: "In
ordinary contexts," Fish reminds us again, "talk is produced with the goal of trying to move the world in one
direction rather than another" (the italics mine again).
Moving the world is just what Lynn Cheney, George
Steiner, William Bennett, Alan Bloom and Chester Finn
are endeavoring to do. And if this is so, for heaven's sake,
why is Fish criticizing them since the argument that sustains them is one that Fish has himself lovingly prepared?
Fish's indignation, then, is at odds with his argument,
so that the two invocations, that indignation and the argument that follows, describe the antipodes of a closed sphere
in space. It is not, then, their advocacy that Fish would
dispute, but the judgments themselves or the way in which
they are reached. "What are these truths," he asks, "and
how and by whom are they to be identified?" But of these
questions, the first is asked rhetorically, since the theses
advanced by Lynn Cheney and others are well known; and
the second is unanswerable on the grounds that no one
knows quite how the truth is ever reached. It is the last of
these questions that expresses the dissenting Fish, by whom
functioning as a way of suggesting that the truths answer-
ing to the first part of the question have been corrupted by
a partisan, a political, agenda and so do not count as truths
at all.
This is argument by insinuation, to give it a name and
assign it to a rhetorical category, and consists in the
expectation that a series of slight doubts will sum to a
substantial deficit. It is invalid as an argumentative form
and like so many such arguments, it does not survive a
confrontation with a counter-example. Proponents of a
core curriculum in arithmetic, to take the obvious case,
often stress that the natural numbers follow a certain order
and must be arranged in a certain way, so that 10 is
indisputably a greater number than six. Greater for whom,
one might ask, following Fish? The appropriate answer
must surely be that it does not matter. The argument by
multiculturalists in favor of a system according to which
the number two is followed by many or the denunciation by
feminist epistemologists of a phallocentric number system
in which some numbers are greater than others and so
function as swollen symbols of patriarchy—these we dismiss as an idiotic irrelevance, whatever the pitch of controversy; correspondingly, the affirmation that 10 is greater
than six retains its truth even if made by those who occupy
the hot white center of overwhelming political power.
What remains, then, of Fish's argumentative meditation on the great books is his projected sense that there is
conflict about the canon, a point trivially true inasmuch as
Fish's essay itself contributes to that conflict; but the fact
that certain familiar claims about the western tradition have
been contested hardly means that they are false.
culture, its language, its way of life, its presumed moral
universe, is an expression of European culture and that its
chief legal and government institutions are Anglo Saxon in
their cast and character; that the United States is in its
largest aspect a part of western civilization and not the alien
civilizations of Africa or the east.
Against this, Fish would argue that Schlesinger's book
is in a tradition of turn-of-the-century anti-immigration
works such as The Melting Pot Mistake (Henry Pratt
Fairchild) or Our Country (Josiah Strong). In the tradition?
Not at all. Fish is "arguing for a match at every
level, from the smallest detail to the deepest
assumptions."
Really? In what particulars? Fish mentions only three. The works Fish deplores he
deplores because in the first instance they are
"anti-immigration tracts"; in the second, "antiCatholic" in their sentiments; and in the third,
expressive of "out and out racism."
Anti-immigration? What Schlesinger says
is this: "American has so long seen itself as the
asylum for the oppressed and the persecuted—
and has done itself and the world so much good
thereby—that any curtailment in immigration
offends something in the Americans soul."
Anti-catholic? There is no mention of the
word 'catholic' in the index of Schlesinger's
book; the word does not occur essentially in the
text. So much for that "match at every level,
from the smallest detail to the deepest assumptions."
Racist? What Schlesinger says is: "White
settlers had systematically pushed the American
Indians back, killed their braves, seized their
lands, and sequestered their tribes. They had
brought Africans to America to work their plantations and Chinese to build their railroads. They
had enunciated glittering generalities of freedom and withheld them from people of color.
Their Constitution protected slavery, and their
laws made distinctions on the basis of race. ...It
occurred to damned few white Americans in
these years that Americans of color were entitled
to the rights and liberties promised by the Constitution."
In a passage already notorious, Fish asks
whether Arthur Schlesinger is a racist. "If you
mean by racism," he responds, answering his
own question, "the deployment of a vocabulary
that avoids racist talk but has the effects of
perpetuating racist stereotypes and the institutions that promote them then...Mr. Schlesinger, with his
talk of the inevitable Anglo Saxon 'coloring' of the
American character and the necessity of sublimating ethnic
strains in a true American amalgam, is a shoo-in."
If what Schlesinger has written makes him a racist,
all that I can say is, count me in.
I would not leave the reader with the impression that the
reprehensible Fish is a representative Fish. The Fish .
that I myself have come to treasure is a Fish whose fine
sense of the margins of the preposterous, whether in argument or affirmation, is undercut at every occasion by a very
human need to determine whether those margins may be
crossed without anyone anywhere noticing that anything is
amiss. It is thus that Fish recounts his own experiences with
affirmation action. Passed over for some high level administrative position, he attributes his bad luck to a preference
for minorities or women on the part of the institution that
might have hired him. "Although I was disappointed," he
writes manfully, "I did not conclude that the situation was
'unfair.' "
How delicious! Here is a full professor of English and
law at Duke University, a man with not a financial or
professional care in the world, his reputation excepted,
blithely assuming that he has something in common with
the poor schnooks (like me) who have been cashiered from
temporary jobs in order to make room for women or blacks.
Ah, Stanley. Ah, humanity.
For the most part, these essays make for good company. I say for the most part because there is one essay
in this collection that Stanley Fish will, I am persuaded,
remember with a moan of embarrassed dismay. I refer to
his attack on Arthur Schlesinger in "Bad Company."
In The Disuniting of America, Schlesinger argued for
a number of propositions, all of them on the rosy border of
common sense: that the achievement of the United States as DAVID BERLINSKI is a writer in the Bay
a multi-ethnic Empire is contingent upon a shared sense of Area and the author of The Academic
national identity; that the United States in its institutions, its
Asherfeld.
HETERODOXY
PAGE 9
THE REAL DAVID BROCK
by JEFF MUIR
A
fter the question "Who killed Vince
Foster?" the hottest topic among
Washington's chattering classes these
days is the "coming out" of David Brock, the
conservative investigative journalist whose bestselling book, The Real Anita Hill, exposed a
liberal icon as a fraud and whose recent reporting
has shed new light on Bill Clinton's sexual peccadillos and the private lives of both Clintons.
More than a month after Brock openly
proclaimed his homosexuality on the
pages of the Washington Post's Style
section, the story is still generating copy.
There are, of course, several interesting
angles to the story. Was Brock "outed," as he
claims, by the New York Times's Frank Rich
with the connivance of The New Yorker's Sidney
Blumenthal? Why has the self-proclaimed "sensitive" mainstream press, which usually portrays
homosexuality as an oppressed virtue, used
Brock's sexual preference/orientation as a means
of tarring his reputation? And what do
conservatives, generally thought to be "homophobic" or anti-gay, think about one of their
most celebrated and respected members coming
out?
For many on the right, Rich's column of
sexual innuendo about Brock and the consequences that followed it were simply attempts by
the liberal press to bring down America's
hottest conservative voice this side of Rush
Limbaugh and the only investigative journalist of
note on the right. Furthermore, as a young man,
Brock seemed to have his best years ahead of him
and seemed also to have enough of the right stuff
when it came to journalistic digging to someday
become a conservative Bob Woodward.
The improbability of David Brock seems
even more striking when one realizes that he
graduated from that mecca of radicalism, the
University of California at Berkeley, where he
was editor of the daily student newspaper. In
1986, Brock left Berkeley for Washington, D.C., to
take a job as a reporter for Insight magazine, a
small-circulation conservative weekly affiliated
with The Washington Times. Then came a stint
as a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, where
he spent a couple of years writing freelance
articles for The American Spectator and began
work on a book about Congress,
Then, as Brock puts it, the Anita Hill story fell into
his lap. What he thought was a routine assignment instead
blossomed into a blockbuster. His article "The Real Anita
Hill" painted a very different portrait of Clarence Thomas' former assistant from the one that had appeared in
the mainstream press. It was a profile of a woman who
was both weak and calculating, a woman who had her
own agenda and allowed herself to advance the agenda of
others. (The article revealed for the first time that the
original leaks about charges of sexual harassment originated with the staff members working under Democratic
Senators on the Judiciary Committee.) That issue of the
Spectator soon sold out, and when Rush Limbaugh began
to read sections of the article on his radio show the
magazine began selling reprints by the stack.
Brock was literally the only investigative reporter
to cast a suspicious eye on Hill and the only one to dig at
the information buried behind and beneath her relationship with Thomas. Rather than earning him respect, his
article made him plenty of enemies among the country's
journalistic elite. But then, the Spectator could be written
off as, in Katie Couric's words, "a far-right-wing radical
journal," so he wasn't seen as too much of a threat The
networks and the mainstream press pretty much ignored
his revelations both about Hill herself and about the process
of confirming a Supreme Court nominee. But then Brock
went a step farther and turned the article into a book by the
same title. The reporting was solid; the case Brock made
about the venality and fecklessness of Anita Hill catapulted
his book onto the New York Times bestseller list, where it
spent several weeks. {The Real Anita Hill has sold over
170,000 copies to date and will soon be in paperback.)
David Brock could no longer be ignored.
The establishment media did its best at first to freeze
escapades. He decided that the troopers didn't have enough
information to merit an entire book, but he convinced
them to go on the record for his Spectator story. The
magazine released copies of the story to the press several
days before it hit the newsstands. CNN picked it up and
sent its own team down to Little Rock to interview the
Troopers. The rest of the networks followed suit. Then the
Associated Press sent a piece on Brock's story out over
their newswires, and the Washington Post did a front-page
story on it.
All of sudden David Brock was everywhere, from Nightline to C-SPAN. Having
followed up and exceeded the success of his
Anita Hill reporting, Brock had established
himself as the hottest conservative in the
country. But despite the sensational nature of
what has come to be known as
"Troopergate" ("Fornigate,") Brock was still
treated with a measure of disdain or disrespect by his fellow journalists.
His appearance on Nightline was perhaps typical. Brock was paired with Sidney
Blumenthal, a former senior editor of The
New Republic who is now Washington editor
of The New Yorker (whose anti-Brock bias
had been proved by the unorthodox book
review of The Real Anita Hill earlier in the
year). In an amazing display of hubris and
doubletalk, Blumenthal said of Brock, "[he's] a
young right-wing writer—I hesitate to call
him a journalist." Blumenthal, repeating what
had become the standard response to Brock's
revelations about Clinton, stated that since
Brock worked for a publication with political
motives, his reporting was therefore to be
taken with a grain of salt. "There are political
motives and political forces behind this that
ought to be considered," said Blumenthal of
the Trooper story.
Clearly there is a double standard
being applied here, which is characteristic
of left journalism. Forget for a moment his
own blatantly partisan reporting for both The
New Yorker and The New Republic.
DAVID BROCK
Blumenthal himself has been caught allowing "political motives" to interfere with his
credibility. Last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that while he was covering the
1994 presidential campaign, Blumenthal
wrote at least one speech for Democratic
candidate Gary Hart.
Brock doesn't let attacks by people
like Blumenthal get to him. "As long as I
feel comfortable with the facts that I report,
I don't let the criticism and personal attacks bother me,"
he says. "I'm a reporter, an investigative journalist, and
the standard by which I measure myself and by which
others ought to measure me is whether or not I get the
facts right."
him out and later discredit him. The Today Show took the
unusual step of allowing Anita Hill's lawyer to appear
alongside Brock when they interviewed him. The New
Yorker seriously tested the bounds of journalistic ethics by
having two women, who were themselves writing a proHill book about the Thomas affair, review Brock's book.
rock first heard rumors about his sexual orientation
When none of this did any good, the "liberal press" showed
just after the release of the Anita Hill book. In fact,
that it was not a creation of conservative paranoia by going
he had never done much to hide his life-style or stay
a big step further.
"in the closet" in the first place. He simply refused—
unlike other gay writers—to mingle his personal life with
fter his book's great success, Brock was hired full his professional, and so it remained his personal life. In
time as an investigative reporter by the Spectator. any case, the rumors subsided. But then came his coup
Much like the Hill story, the Trooper story
with the Trooper story and the Frank Rich column in the
too seemingly fell into his lap. "I went to Arkansas to look New York Times, which led to his eventual declaration that
into the Vince Foster story," says Brock. "Something about he was gay in a story in the Washington Post.
his death didn't seem right to me. When I got there, I came
"Before I went with the Trooper story," says Brock, "I
into contact with the Troopers, and it just went from
thought about the sex angle and the Anita Hill stuff, and I
there."
figured that someone, somewhere would begin to talk about
Having begun looking for answers to a suspicious my sexual orientation." Did he consider not running the story
Washington suicide, Brock instead found evidence to to protect his privacy? "Only for the briefest of moments,"
confirm some of the rumors about Bill Clinton's alleged according to Brock. "After all, aside from hurting me personinfidelity, one of the sleeping stories (so to speak) of the ally, what my enemies really want is for me to shut up. And
1992 campaign.
I wasn't going to assist them in that effort."
Brock says the Troopers originally approached him
Expecting the issue to come up in the days after the
with the idea that he would collaborate on a book with them
on their first-hand experience with Clinton's extramarital
A
B
PAGE 10
MARCH 1994
Trooper story, Brock recognized the Rich column—
which did not directly accuse him of being gay but
approached the issue obliquely by attacking him as antiwoman—as a "thinly veiled outing." Rich continues to
insist that his column was about Brock's misogyny, and
not his sexuality, claiming that "it is indeed a homophobic
cliche to equate misogyny with homosexuality." But of
course it was exactly that cliche" that Rich was playing on.
In the column Rich used all the code words and
phrases that a generation ago implied homosexuality.
For example: "The slightest sighting of female sexuality
whips [Brock] into a frenzy of misogynist zeal" and "All
women are the same to Mr. Brock: terrifying guttertongued sexual omnivores." Perhaps the most transparent passage in the article had Rich speculating as to
Brock's preferred man: "[His] idea of a non-bizarre man
is one of the troopers, Larry Paterson, whom he idolizes
as a macho image of abstinence: 'tall and trim, with the
upright demeanor and closely cropped hair of a military
officer.'"
The revelation that Brock is a homosexual has
indeed sent shock waves through just about every segment of the political journalism community. Most liberal pundits and columnists have blasted Brock for
complaining about having his sexual orientation revealed while he has made his career and reputation
reporting on the sex lives of other public figures. Conservatives have countered that the original critique of Brock
was that he reported on irrelevant aspects of his subjects
lives—their sexuality—and now that his sexuality can
be used against him, these same liberals are more than
happy to use it to discredit Brock.
Certain fringe elements of the conservative movement have been critical of Brock for being gay. Paul
Cameroon, head of the Family Research Institute, recently criticized Brock, saying, "Shame on him for
coming out of the closet." For the most part, however,
conservatives have said, "So what?"
And that attitude, according to Brock, is one of the
reasons he's always been attracted to the conservative
movement and conservative principles. "I've always felt
more comfortable with conservatives," he says, "because
they generally have an attitude that judges a person based
on his individual abilities and accomplishments. For the
most part, conservatives can be against the radical homosexual agenda as a general principle yet still respect,
admire and work with gay individuals."
Brock says he's been deluged by requests to discuss
his sexuality from the gay and mainstream press. He has
refused every one of them except the original Washington
Post story. Why? "They all wanted me to discuss 'gay
issues'," says Brock, "and I just don't want to be
marginalized as a 'gay writer' or a 'gay conservative.' I do
have opinions on, say, gays in the military or gay marriage. I will not discuss them publicly, because they have
no bearing on what I do: investigative reporting."
Despite having his personal life dragged through the
media, David Brock is on top of the world. Coverage of his
Troopergate scoop has made him the most sought after
conservative commentator around. He has an audience
awaiting his next investigative project with anticipation
(and enemies who await it with fear and trembling). And
while he handles himself superbly on television, Brock
insists that he has no interest in the world of punditry. "I
just want to be a journalist," he maintains. "I'd love to
spend the rest of my life as an investigative reporter,
writing books every few years."
Is there a book on the Clintons in his future? "There's
certainly a couple of books' worth of material there," says
Brock, "but I don't know if I'm going to write one." One
thing is for certain: his enemies have failed if they thought
that they could intimidate Brock. He has no plans to leave
the Spectator, and he has no plans to shy away from
controversial stories.
JEFF MUIR works for the Madison Center for
Educational Research in Washington, D.C.
WHY JOANIE CAN'T ADD continued from page 1 Anne
Bryant, to crow in fractured syntax (coincidentally
proving that, for some women, English class was no breeze
either): "It's a wake-up call to manufacturers that there's
greater sensitivity for toys not to continue stereotypes."
Women probably do not have an inbred inability to do math,
but radical feminists certainly suffer from a fatal attraction
to flawed statistics and sloppy thought that gives the whole
of the second sex a bad name with regards to questions of
numeracy. In fact, hatred for mathematics—and its nearrelative, logic—is virtually the only thing that the various
movements that make tip the left wing in America have in
common anymore.
My favorite example comes from a lesbian feminist
named Victoria Brownworth. She recently wrote a column
in the Philadelphia Gay News in which she repeated a
historical example that is apparently making the rounds
among phallophobes these days. This example is intended
to prove that male heterosexuals can be just as promiscuous as homosexuals. "There were on the streets of London
on the day Victoria was crowned queen, three prostitutes
for every man in England," Brownworth wrote.
Whew! Let's subject that sentence to a little remedial math. First, we'll assume that England had in those
days roughly the same number of men as women. It
becomes obvious that even if every female in the nation,
from babies to octogenarians, had been dressed up like
Madonna and planted on street corners, the hooker-tojohn ratio could not have exceeded 1 to 1. Virtually the
entire female populations of France and Holland would
have had to be imported to reach a 3 to 1 ratio of prostitutes
to male English citizens. But odds are that only about a
quarter of the males in England would have been in
London that day, so the hookers would have outnumbered
their potential clients by about 12 to 1. Is it any wonder
that, after wading through this crowd, Victoria would go
on to usher in an era of prudery? The appalling thing about
such idiocies is not that someone has uttered them, but that
they can be gazed upon by editors and read by the public
and never questioned. A classic example occurred when
the great thinkers of the American feminist movement
rose as one to declare Naomi Wolf's book, The Beauty
Myth, a masterpiece. Wolf's central assertion is that
American women are starving themselves into anorexia in
an attempt to attain an ideal of beauty forced on them by
the white male establishment. Great theme, but unfortunately no such trend exists. Nutrition experts regularly
survey the American population to determine rates of
anorexia and bulimia. The best such surveys show the
numbers holding steady at below 2 percent of American
women.
But the facts aren't even speed bumps to Wolf's rush
to judgment. She spews number after number until she
convinces herself that the majority of American females
are dangerously thin. (Hasn't this woman ever been to a
K-mart?) Four out of five female college students suffers
from either anorexia or bulimia, she tells us—contrary to
all evidence. Of her absurd statistics, here's my favorite:
"The United Kingdom now has 3.5 million anorexics or
bulimics (95 percent of them female), with 6,000 new cases
yearly."
Nice try, Naomi. But if Britain is accumulating
anorexics and bulimics at the paltry rate of 6,000 yearly,
it would take 583 years to reach a total of 3.5 million. The
only way the country could have reached that total is by
adding up virtually every anorexic who had trod English
soil since the signing of the Magna Carta. Anorexia must
lead, not to an early death, but to immortality.
The idea that any warm, fuzzy sentiment is entitled
to uncritical acceptance certainly is not unique to the
women of the left. Mush-minded males are equally guilty.
A recent Harris Poll made the claim that one in 10
American youths between the ages of 10 and 19 had fired
a gun at someone. The poll was funded by a gun-control
group that has the rather Orwellian goal of "transforming
gun violence from a criminal issue to a public health
emergency." ("Doc, I'm feeling depressed. Can I get a
prescription for an AK-47?") Louis Harris himself was
quoted as saying the poll was scientific. He didn't say what
sort of science, however. Alchemy? Astrology?
The most recent census reports that there are about
35 million, youths in the 10-19 age group. Ten percent of
35 million is 3.5 million. But the FBI reports that only
about 3,000 homicides are committed yearly by youths 10
through 19 years of age; In other words/ about 3,497,000;,
kids must have shot and missed. This indicates that Mr.
Harris's pollster^ forgot to ask an important follow-up
HETERODOXY
question to all those 10-year-olds who claimed to
have shot at someone: "No, I mean with a real
gun?" Harris claimed the poll had a 3-percent
margin of error. The actual margin of error was
approximately 116,500 percent. Details, mere
details.
Remember how the newspapers used to
jump all over every inaccuracy in the public
utterances of Ronald Reagan? The same editors
touted this poll as if Mr. Harris had brought
down his figures from Mt. Sinai. Virtually
any assertion that supports liberal goals seems
to go unexamined in the press. A good
example from the gay liberation debate is
the argument, unquestioned in the media, that
gays are no more likely than heterosexuals to
be child molesters. The logic goes like this: Most
child molesters are heterosexuals. Therefore,
heterosexuals are more likely to molest
children than homosexuals, homophobic
propaganda notwithstanding.
Amazingly, this fallacy has won general
acceptance. A Colorado judge even cited it in throwing
out the results of a statewide referendum that would have
banned the granting of civil rights based on sexual
orientation. It is, however, total nonsense. Most child
molesters are heterosexual for an obvious reason: Most
people are heterosexual. The only way to answer the
question of whether gays are more prone to pederasty is to
determine if they commit the crime out of proportion to
their numbers.
To answer that question, you first have to determine what percentage of the population is homosexual. According to data assembled by a study of
Psychological Reports, this figure is probably about 2
percent and certainly not more than 4 percent. Next, you
have to ask what percentage of child molestations are
homosexual in nature. If that number exceeds 4 percent,
gays would seem to be more prone to pederasty. Studies of
arrests in various jurisdictions show that, on average, 40
percent of those charged with child molestation are homosexual. At that rate, homosexuals are about 16 times more
likely to be prosecuted for pederasty than heterosexuals.
This conclusion is obvious from the data, but anyone
voicing it would immediately be labeled a "homophobe"
(an absurd term that, reduced to its Greek roots, means
literally "afraid of sameness" or, if one prefers an English/
Greek etymology, "afraid of homos"). However, facts are
neutral. They have no ideological content. Fundamentalist Christians might argue that a homosexual tendency to
pederasty would prove that all gays should be thrown in
jail. Conversely, the North American Man-Boy Love
Association might, and in fact does, argue that pederasty
is an essential part of gay life and should have full legal
protection. In either case, the facts don't change (though
the fact that NAMBLA is a member in good standing of the
International Lesbian and Gay Alliance certainly adds a
little something to the debate).
The forces of political correctness have created an
atmosphere in America in which certain facts simply
cannot be mentioned. Perhaps a thorough study of the
subject would prove that the average, well-adjusted gay
person is indeed no more likely to commit pederasty than
the average, well-adjusted hetero. We'll never know; the
subject simply can't be examined.
It's no wonder the left's current target is Western I
culture itself. Beginning with Plato, Western culture A
has been organized around the idea that the world can be
understood through reason. The one outstanding leftist
intellectual in the Western tradition was, of course, Karl
Marx. He claimed that socialism was an exact science, and
it was taught that way right up until the fall of the Soviet
Union. Science having failed them, leftists have turned to
emotionalism and mysticism.
America's campus radicals of the '60s were nothing
if not perceptive, and one thing they perceived was that the
hard sciences were, indeed, hard. Advanced math required
real work, but anyone who could read slow and talk fast
could get a degree in English or sociology. Vietnam was
a distant threat; calculus was far more menacing. The most
bitter fights on American campuses were the fights to
make the curriculum "relevant," i.e. easier. An interest in
mathematics, never all that popular to begin with, became
unacceptable behavior among the hip people on campus.
That feeling has persisted to this day.
...
PAGEll
"There's something of a feeling that people who are
good at math are sort of idiot savants, which is absurd,"
says John Allen Paulos, a Temple University math professor who coined the term innumeracy: "I know lots of
mathematicians who read widely, but I know no one who's
not a mathematician who reads mathematics." The antipathy among academics toward math is just a symptom of a
general dumbing-down of American culture, says Paulos.
"In general, I find people don't make arguments anymore.
They don't say, "This is what I believe, and this is why I
believe it.' They say, 'This is what I feel.'"
I'm not much for conspiracy theories, but if there's
a grassy knoll in all mis, one of the shadowy figures
standing on it must be Ira Magaziner. Magaziner played a
pivotal role in destroying higher education in America. In
the '60s, Magaziner led the fight at Brown University to
end requirements that students take such courses as math,
science and foreign languages. This trend swept the nation. Magaziner is now asking Americans to accept on
faith a 1,342-page health reform package with a math
problem on every page. (Can you say "value-added tax?")
And up there on the knoll next to Ira Magaziner is that
three-letter organization of government employees whose
power-grabbing schemes reach into virtually every area of
American life. No, I'm not talking about the CIA; it is the
NEA that I have in mind. The National Education Association (with its wholly-owned subsidiary, the Democratic Party) continues to resist all efforts to improve
American education. Their idea of reform is still tied to the
r
60s cliche of relevance. The mere mention of school
choice drives them nuts, but come up with a curriculum
that states the Mayans invented the toaster oven and
they'll gladly parrot it. In one study of American's competitiveness in education, our ninth-graders came out 14th
of 17 nations, tied with kids in Singapore and Thailand. In
another, the best schools in the Minneapolis area turned
out to be about equal to the worst in comparable cities in
Asia.
In short, we are a nation of morons, especially our
teachers. One survey of high school seniors found that
those who intended to major in education averaged just
845 on the combined SAT. You can score 845 on the SAT
by answering correctly just 56 of a total of 145 questions,
or slightly under 39 percent. Get a degree in education
(another "science" that, unlike Marxism, still awaits its
debunking), and you’ve got a job for life—"as long as you
don't get caught having sex with the kids," as one teacher
told me. That sounds incredible, but it's true. The NEA has
been so successful in winning tenure for even the most
incompetent of teachers that the basic qualification for
teaching in the U.S. these days is not academic achieve-
ment but a disinterest in pederasty.
All this bothers the American left not a whit They
have come flush up against the reality that the best-laid
plans of mice and women can't change human nature.
Rationality didn't work, so they're trying irrationality.
Liberal beliefs have descended to the level of the mantra;
it's not whether the words make any sense, what matters
is that .you mouth them often and with enthusiasm. Chant
"AIDS doesn't discriminate" enough and people will
ignore the statistics that show AIDS is the most discriminating contagious disease in American history. It's reached
the point were anyone who introduces facts into a discussion is automatically labeled a right-winger.
The good news about this turn away from the
rational is that it may mark the death of the American Left.
The '60s activists are now facing the doom brought about
by their own success. They dumbed down American
education to such a degree that an innumerate like Naomi
Wolf could graduate from Yale and go on to become a
leading intellectual on the left. One problem: when she
became leading, she started wavering in her leftist commitments; now she's writing articles for Glamour magazine, saying how she really likes men after all, and she was
recently listed in Esquire magazine as one of a new wave
of "do-me" feminists. But who can blame her for her
ideological meandering? No one knows what the left is
anymore, In the early part of this century, leftists made the
world tremble. They took over nations, raised huge armies
and changed lives by the millions, often by ending them.
But the leftist movement these days has taken on the air of
a bitch session in a college dorm. Naomi wants to be able
to stuff herself with prime rib and Twinkies and still be
desirable to men. It's hard to think of a government
program that could grant that wish.
Militant gays, meanwhile, want to make the Army
more like the Village People; again this sounds like a
difficult goal. Black intellectuals want to have a racial
memory of having built the pyramids; perhaps NASA can
start work on a time machine.
Unlike Lenin's, the modern left's agenda can't be
achieved by the simple expedient of eliminating a few
inconvenient souls. Barbie was right: Math class is tough,
and the left is getting a failing grade, although it is the rest
of us who get the report card.
PAUL MULSHINE is a writer living in New
Jersey.
PAGE 12
MARC
SEX UNIVERSITY continued from page 1
This wins him a laugh.
Now Angela is on the hot seat, and someone asks
why she thinks the mimicry game sucks. "I don't like oneon-one," she says. Angela claimed she has had sex with
five men at one time, but she doesn't practice S&M. "I like
to stay in control," she says, without explaining how she
kept control of the eager fivesome.
"Why is this called a 'Mark Group?'" someone then
wants to know. It is a legitimate question. Our host, a
freckled blond named Donna, responds. "Victor Baranco
compares it to carnival barkers. The people they bring in
are 'marks.' Everybody is a mark for something and with
us it happens to be love."
V
ictor Baranco, it emerges, is the founder of
More University in Lafayette, California, the
institution where the hosts of this "Mark
Group" and several of the participants in the session
received their professional training. This group in San
Diego has not been trying to revive arcane '60s lifestyles, as it sometimes seemed during the meeting, but
doing school work, part of More University's recruiting
program.
More's courses, the literature explains, include "Basic Hexing," "Aphrodisia," "Mutual Pleasurable Stimulation of the Human Nervous System" and "A Weekend
with Vic." The most unique thing about More is that it
grants degrees. As California's official Council for Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education verifies,
since 1979 the Golden State has approved More to grant
Bachelor's and Master's degrees in the humanities and
communications, and Ph.D. degrees in "Lifestyles" and
"Sensuality."
According to recent descriptions, More University’s
founder, Victor Baranco, 59, stands six-foot-two and
weighs some 300 pounds. He is currently living in Hawaii
where he has faced drug charges. He is not approachable.
"Dr. Baranco talks to people who have the proper
requisites and three grand," Jackie Van Sinderen, More's
Dean of Instruction, told the Contra Costa Times. She was
referring to a More University course, "Audience with
Victor Baranco," which costs a cool $3,000. When Times
reporter Michael Hytha travelled all the way to "Dr."
Baranco's hideaway in Pupukea, Hawaii, he found himself confronted by a bare-chested bodyguard named Sam,
who was polishing a white Cadillac in front of Baranco's
purple house and who warned, "Vic doesn't like to
speak with reporters." Yet as with the presidents of
more conventional universities, Baranco has a
curriculum vitae, however much he tries to hide it.
More's founder was bora Wilbert V. Baranco in
Oakland in 1934, the son of a black jazz pianist and a
Jewish woman named Florida Mae. Baranco has claimed
he was a gifted child but drummed out of Hebrew school
because of "the black thing." He has also claimed he
played in the 1954 Rose Bowl, but unfortunately Cal's
squad didn't go to the Bowl that year.
Author David Felton profiled Baranco in his 1972
book, Mindfitckers, and the portrait was far from flattering. As Felton explained: "Charles Manson, Victor Baranco
and Mel Lyman, the superheroes of the following stories,
are mindfuckers simply because they have made it their
business to fuck men's minds and to control them. They’ve
succeeded by assuming godlike authority and using such
mindfucking techniques as physical and verbal bullying
and group humiliation." Baranco is the least well known
of this threesome, but for all their other achievements,
Manson and Lyman never established a school approved
by the State of California to grant Ph.D.s in sex.
Baranco earned his administrative credentials by
joining the Sexual Freedom League in Berkeley in the' 60s
Followers call Baranco Thought "responsible hedonism,"
but let Baranco explain: "It's like a boat. The woman is the
steerer and the man is the motor. And once you can relax,
men, and settle down into slavery in the motor room—
what a gas! They take care of you sexually, feed you and
clothe you. They take care of all your creature comforts
and all you gotta do is shovel coal."
Felton portrays Baranco as a wheeler-dealer type,
who along with Haight-Ashbury colleagues Robert Kerr
and Paul Robbins set up the Institute for Human Abilities
(IHA), a real estate corporation, in late 1969. Baranco
and his pals bought derelict houses at low prices, got
hippies to fix them up, then resold or rented the places at
a handsome profit. But there was more to it than commerce.
The partners also published Aquarius Magazine,
which advertised courses such as "Basic Sensuality" and
"A Weekend with Vic Baranco," both $45. Another
subject of instruction was masturbation. According to
Felton, Baranco and his followers had some doubts about
intercourse. In the words of a man named Wayne, it is a
"haphazard affair." Instead the institute recommended
mutual masturbation as "a 'surefire way to a perfect
orgasm every time.' He called it 'doing' the other person,
and told us how to do a perfect 'do.' "
The managing editor of Aquarius was a guy named
Dewey, who ran the operation from a basement closet.
Every month, Baranco would send in a taped "parable" for
Dewey to transcribe and edit. Dewey said this was his
"toughest task."
One parable concerned a woman who for a 1ong time
drove by a hitchhiker she saw every day, then finally
decided to pick him up. He promptly killed her. (‘There
was no moral to the story," said Dewey, "but the heaviness
was obvious.") Another parable was about "a bunch of
wretched characters who lived in a concentration camp
surrounded by squalor and barbed wire. There was no
toilets, and their food was thrown on the ground with their
shit. Every day an executioner would drag one of them to
the chopping block and bloodily decapitate his in full
view of the others." After several paragraphs of lurid
description, it turned out the victims were actual chickens.
By one account, Baranco was influenced by the
Millionaire, a television program from the '50s in which a
man of means gives away $ 1 million to a strange in each
episode. Another influence came from the Lloyd Douglas
novel, Magnificent Obsession, in which a character gives
away the family fortune to the needy. Baranco established
Turn On To America (TOTA), as Felton describes it. ‘to
collect government and foundation funds for alcoholics,
nonplaceable foster children and paroles.”
B
aranco acquired the 16-acre Lafayette spread
currently houses More University in 1968. The
grounds feature a main residence and houses, a
studio, a house trailer, some shanties, tennis courts and
assorted junk cars. The buildings are all painted a bright
purple because that was the favorite color of Baranco’s
first wife Suzanne, whom he married in 1959. They bore
two children then divorced in 1976. Suzanne, however
continued to live on the Lafayette property, which
neighbors call the "Purple Palace" and journalist have
dubbed "Fuck U," a tag that fits in ways other than
curriculum.
The campus features a lookout tower and guardhouses at each entrance. Armed guards prowl the property
and signs warn: "No trespassing, unless you want your
feelings hurt" and "Only cowards commit suicide slowly.”
Members of More's paying student body arrive in purple
Cadillac limousines and get around on campus in golf
carts, which travel on paths paved with carpet remains.
A 1978 More course catalog explains that the school
was established in 1967 to "expand the physical, spiritual
and intellectual capacities, with tolerance for all apparent
alien encounters." But the prophet of responsible hedonism found that, even in swinging California, tolerance has
limits. In 1978, according to the Contra Cost Times, the
county sued and got a court order prohibits more than
five unrelated people from living on the property. Baranco
simply moved classes elsewhere, then moved
HETERODOXY
them back when a court of appeals overturned the ban.
Also in 1978, Contra Costa County health officials
reported that a three-year-old girl contracted gonorrhea
while on the Lafayette property. No charges were brought,
but the parents, who lived on campus, agreed to a $3,500
settlement with the county. That same year, Contra Costa
sheriff's investigators said they had evidence that four
men sexually molested two girls and a boy and that there
had been illegal drug use at More. For reasons that remain
unclear, the sheriffs called off the investigation, and there
were no arrests or charges.
That same year, during the apotheosis of alternative
lifestyles under Governor Jerry Brown, Baranco applied
to the California Department of Education for approval,
which the state granted in 1979 despite the troubling
sexual incidents. More University could now award academic degrees.
According to Darlene Laval, who headed the state
council that reviewed More in 1986, all one needed to do
for approval at that time was show that they had a certain
amount of money and a library, or access to one, "and that
was about it." There was no review of the school's faculty,
facilities, or curricula. State approval doubtless raised
Baranco's self-esteem, even as it enhanced More's recruiting prospects. (Werner Erhard of EST fame even
attended a Baranco class.) But approval did not eliminate
the school's public-relations problems.
Dr. Marc Hirsch had been serving as the head of
More's Department of Medical Science. In 1980,
California's Board of Medical Quality Assurance revoked
Hirsch's license on the grounds that he had been prescribing excessive amounts of narcotics and mood-altering
drugs. The same year Hirsch married Victor Baranco's exwife, Suzanne.
During 1981-82, More filed three lawsuits against
the Contra Costa Times, which found the university a
lively topic. Although all three suits were dismissed, the
school's fondness for legal action was not diminished.
Court records show that Baranco has been involved in nine
lawsuits over property rights, including a long struggle
with his own parents. The university recently filed a libel
suit against the San Francisco Chronicle, which dubbed
the school an "Academy of Carnal Knowledge." Still
another suit involved Contra Costa County. During this
tiff, More lawyer and longtime resident Richard Hyland
said, "We'll consider suing everyone."
After the suits against the Times were dismissed, More
continued its affairs with little publicity. Indeed, few
people in the Bay Area know such a place exists, even
though it operates a sort of extension campus in the purple
More house in San Francisco (although the city at one time
shut down Baranco's houses and "sanctuary" programs fqr
code violations). Throughout the mid-
PAGE 13
1980s, Baranco was building up a faculty for his stateapproved operation.
M
ore's chief executive officer is Alexander Van
Sinderen, 48, who majored in history at Stanford
University, served in the Peace Corps from
1967-69 and did graduate work at Syracuse. Van Sinderen
also holds a doctorate in lifestyles from More U. His
dissertation was titled, "A Married Couple and a Single
Woman as a Social and Sexual Unit." He and his wife live
with a woman named Marilyn.
Jackie Van Sinderen, 48, Alex's wife and More's
dean of instruction, is also a veteran of Stanford, the Peace
Corps and Syracuse. A press account identifies Jackie as
a former member of More University's boxing team,
which was discontinued several years ago.
Suzanne Baranco Hirsch,55, received her doctorate
in sensuality from More University in 1980. Thus qualified, she has since chosen to pursue a career as dean of
More's Sensuality department.
Former sociology major Cynthia Baranco, 40, married
Victor Baranco in 1979 and now teaches at More and
participates in Bay Area Mark Groups. More boasts a total
of 34 faculty members, 15 of whom have doctorates—one
from UCLA and 14 from More. The state lists More's
chief administrator as Lilyan Binder, 43, a graduate of
Hunter College and a former mental health counselor.
The courses offered at More include:
•Basic Hexing: This course describes hexing as a concep
tual game that every human being plays, and of which a
very few people are aware. It provides the student with
the history, technique, structure and applications of
hexing. The extent to which one can control his hexing
is the extent to which one has power in his universe. (2
days; $250)
•Basic Oestrology: describes the frame of reference that
explains human experience. ($300)
•Aphrodisid: Inhibited sexual desire is the most widely
reported sexual difficulty in the nation today.
"Aphrodisia" is a weekend of illuminating information
and functional practices that provide the student with
overt control over what is considered the most elusive
aspect of sensual pleasuring. (Basic Sensuality and
Basic Communication prerequisites; $360)
•Weekend with Vic: A totally unstructured weekend in
which the instructor will answer any and all questions
asked. The content of this course is totally dependent on
the student's ability to have [sic]. (Prerequisite: 2 courses;
$360)
• Mutual Pleasurable Stimulation of the Human Nervous
System: A six-week course that meets for one
three-hour session per week. Limited
to married couples or consenting adults who agree to be
laboratory partners for the duration of the course. Extensive examination of certain conditioned societal limitations on sensory awareness, including sex practices,
partner exchange, emotional involvement related to
sexing, oral-genital relationships. (Prerequisites: Basic
and Advanced Sensuality; $375)
• Expansion of Sexual Potential: This program is designed
to introduce the student to the nature of his/her own
sexual potential. In a clinical setting, under the hands-on
guidance of agreed-upon, selected members of the Department of Sensuality, individuals or couples are led in
the exploration of the parameters of their sexual response. Social and sexual resistance to the expansion of
this potential and its attendant terrors are identified, and
appropriate methods of overcoming these barriers are
demonstrated. Subjects are instructed in techniques of
training partners in both causative and effective roles,
and detailed methods for survival sex practices are
presented. (5 prerequisites; $10,080)
11 of More's courses were designed by Victor Baranco,
who has described the "mutual stimu-:ion" program as
"making friends with another crotch." The Expansion of
Sexual Potential includes a two-week stay at Lafayette
and costs $16,800. According to state officials, More's
entire doctoral program will set a student back $43,200.
Just how much revenue the school brings in is not
clear, however. The Contra Costa Times has reported that
the various entities housed at More control $1.7 million in
East Bay real estate and generate revenues of about $1
million. These "entities" are an interlocking directorate of
non-profits including "Turn On To America" and "The
Private Sector," which both deal with the homeless. To the
Institute of Human Abilities Baranco has added Humore
Inc., the real estate company in charge of the East Bay
properties. Both Humore and the institute are run from a
property on Purson Lane in Lafayette, one of several
residences owned by Baranco. The Times has also reported that in 1990 More reported total income of $958,140,
though it is not clear what came from where.
Baranco's charitable impulses, some reporters discovered, did not extend to his parents. According to
probate records, when Wilbert Baranco Sr. died in 1983,
he disinherited his son. And when Victor's mother, Florida
Mae, died in 1987, she left everything to Victor's two
adult children. "As for our son," Florida Mae wrote, "he
put us out of his life about 10 years ago. He didn't come
to see his father before he died nor did he attend the
funeral...he made it clear that he doesn't care about me."
Baranco may have put his parents out of his life, but
he could not permanently avoid the scrutiny of the state,
which had allowed him to function in loco parentis for
years on his Lafayette campus. By the
PAGE 14
MARCH 1994
mid-1980s, California had tightened its rules for private
post-secondary education. A team of educational inspectors were preparing for their first trip to the purple palace,
completely unaware of what they would find.
"It was an eye-opener," says Darlene Laval, who
chaired the state's regulatory council for five years
and now works for the Department of Education as a
consultant. In 1986 she and two colleagues spent two
memorable days at More.
"Here were all these old limos and people sitting
around in their underwear peeling potatoes," says Laval,
who describes the place as "really filthy," to the point
that "I would hesitate to drink their coffee." A guy named
Jim, Laval says, "came out of a building buckling his
pants, followed by a woman, who was followed by a
child."
One of the teachers also turned out to be a student.
"She said she had gotten her degree in sensuality and was
now working on her other degree, for which she would
have to spend a week with Vic," says Laval. "I said we
need to talk to Vic, only to learn that he was 'too busy.' "
To maintain approved status, schools must send in
a lengthy self-study. More's version said in one place:
"Equipment to take to class: a towel, a mirror, and all
body parts." This caused review team member Roz Elms,
who earned her Ph.D. at U.C. Berkeley, to crack, "Doesn't
that discriminate against the handicapped?" When she
learned of the "Weekend with Vic" course, Elms asked,
"Is there a weekend with Vickie?"
The inspection team wanted to see the classrooms
and attend sessions. They were told they couldn't. In
fact, says Laval, "They said none were being held. They
said the classes were in Oakland." Aware of past com
plaints against the school, the team wanted to see the
nursery. They were told that it was closed that day
because a child had fallen and was "on the verge of
dying." But a staffer did let them see one building that
contained a state-of-the-art video studio with a gyneco
logical table as its centerpiece.
"My mouth dropped," says Laval. She and Elhis,
imaginations running wild, asked about the purpose of
the table. They were told that this was where Vic "did his
sessions" in front of the student body. As Laval recalls,
"They had a library of tapes of things like 'Vic's birthday
party.' There were hundreds of tapes, in order and
labeled. This was the only library we found at the place."
Neither was there any required reading.
The team asked to see financial records. Such
information was not available, they were told. "There
was not one verification for any of the faculty," says
Laval, "not one qualification for anything, let alone their
speciality." The team then asked to read some theses and
were handed a cardboard box containing eleven.
"Most were handwritten and none was bound,"
says Laval. "One woman wrote that Vic had kept a
stimulation of a student going for seven hours and why
couldn't her boyfriend do this? This was her thesis."
Roz Elms read a dissertation about sexual encounters titled "Recollections of a Married Couple and a
Single Woman" and pronounced it "not original research." The paper was for a Ph.D, in Sensuality. Another paper was about pregnancy and contained nude
photos.
By now the state review team was finding it "hard
to be professional," as Laval puts it, and feeling dirty to
boot. "They stuck us in this one-room shack, and there
was no way for us to talk without them hearing us. They
made phone calls with a hand cupped over the receiver,
like some B-movie." But the visitors had seen all they
needed to see*
More failed 108 out of 111 points of evaluation and
the team recommended that approved status be denied. The
council agreed, but More's lawyer showed up at the hearing
and threatened Elms with a lawsuit for "lying" about the
school and performing a "hatchet job." The school's advocate also charged that Laval "didn't know what she was
talking about." More University appealed and won.
California was then in the process of changing its
regulatory system, and the procedures used to review
More were never officially adopted. While new regulations were being drafted, California grandfathered in
More and a number of other schools with questionable
qualifications. More duly expanded its operations to New
York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta and other cities.
'■>:
T
he Lafayette campus maintained an uneasy truce
with neighbors until the university started to house
the homeless in the early 1990s. One family
whose property borders More reported constant noise
and garbage, including hypodermic needles, being
dumped over the fence. Yet when neighbors complained,
More said that it was a witch-hunt caused by the long
standing activism of Baranco and others at the university
on behalf of the homeless.
"They are hiding behind the politically correct stuff,"
says a woman who asked not to identified. "Nobody wants
to be. against the homeless." Morehouse attorney Richard
Hyland had learned another PC trick. He pointed out that
Baranco was of "black-and Jewish heritage," and therefore
the complaints were "based in racism." But, as it turned
out, the homeless issue provided journalists with an
opportunity to penetrate the purple curtain that had veiled
More's inner doings for so long.
On May 27, 1992, Donna Hemmila and Carolyn
Leider, two reporters for the Contra Costa Times, showed
up at More claiming they needed a place to stay. A man
named "Joe without hair" let them in. They registered at
Waipuna Lounge, a 24-hour diner for guests, and here
their discoveries began.
At More, the reporters learned, only first names are
used. "Do you want clean underwear?" someone asked.
Leider, who has examined the records of More's nonprofits in Sacramento, explains that More receives gen
erous donations from corporations, including Jockey.
The reporters also discovered that the campus had been
upgraded since the 1986'site-review visit. It now boasted
a closed circuit television system. On that evening's
"news," the top story was a series of party scenes of a
potbellied man dumping ice cubes down a woman's
bikini, followed by safe sex tips and gossip. In another
feature, a woman sang an off-key version of Peggy Lee's
"Fever."
.
Those described as the campus' "elite" lived on the
hill, and the reporters were warned not to get too close.
But they did learn that the elite enjoy the service of
female servants dressed in skimpy costumes, which they
wear sans drawers in spite of Jockey's largesse. In
addition to fashion, the faculty was also sensitive to nonhomeless visitors. "They let them in but videotape their
every move," Leider says. The communards are also
sensitive to communication.
"You don't have any rights here," a More staffer
named Tom barked when a homeless guy asked to use the
phone. "So don't even think that you do."
The reporters were the only female visitors in a
room full of guys they didn't know, many smoking and
drinking beer. The pair spent most of the night playing
cards and bailed out early the next morning.
John Koopman of the Contra Costa Times followed up on his colleagues' discoveries by attending a
Basic Sensuality course with three other students: a
dentist, an engineer and a veterinarian. The teacher was
Joe Hills, who had the class talk about male and female
genitalia and masturbation. He also asked them to strip
and use mirrors to take a "visual inventory of [their]
bodies." Homework questions asked whether they would
have sex with men, midgets, paraplegics and animate.
The course included a "do date," which, Koopman
wrote, "usually consists of one person masturbating the
other."
When Dan Reed of the San Francisco Chronicle
went to the More campus, they ushered him into a room
with a conference table across from the Van Sinderen
menage a trois. More staffers videotaped the entire
interview, during which one of the scantily clad maids
brought in water.
Reed discovered that More uses its own currency,
called "scrip," which was once old Pall Mall cigarette
packs embossed with the university seal, but which now .
resembles Monopoly money and is called "Karma Molecules."
Allan Steele, a hypnotherapist from Coral Gables,
Florida, who treats sexual disorders, said he and his wife
Rochelle paid $47,500 to the university for doctorate
courses. "While I was living on campus there was encouragement to use illegal drugs, including the availability to purchase illegal drugs," Steele wrote in an April 5,
1992, letter to the California Council for Private
Postseeondary Education. "They also engage in prostitu-
tion," Steele added, "that is, sex for money, with quotas
[of conquests], which if not met results in threats of
physical violence and exclusion."
Dan Reed reported that in late May 1992 the State
Council demanded a response to the accusation but received none from More, which filed a $120 million libel
suit against Steele. The hypnotist won't talk but stands by
his allegations. More has also sued the Chronicle for libel,
but the paper stands by its stories and has published no
retraction. More's well-known litigiousness may have
scared off A Current Affair, which was interested in doing
a story on the university but wary of getting involved in a
prolonged legal wrangle.
The agency currently charged with protecting Californians from educational fraud is the Council for Private
Postseeondary and Vocational Education (CPPVE),
established in 1991. As its "fact sheet" says, the council
certifies "that an institution meets minimum statutory
standards for integrity, financial stability and
educational quality, including the offering of bona fide
instruction by qualified faculty and the appropriate assessment of students' achievement prior to, during and at
the end of its program." Further there are "tuition refund
formulas" should "the institution breach its contract with
the students."
The state considers the task of protecting consumers from educational fraud so important that it pays the
council's director, Kenneth A. Miller, a handsome
$82,000 a year plus benefits. Other professional staffers
earn in the $60,000 range. As those who try to contact
them will verify, these people spend a lot of time away
from their desks or flying around the country to conferences. But although it has taken stands on issues involving race, and gender and multiculturalism in other institutions, the CPPVE has, to date, done nothing about
More.
"California is much more tolerant than the rest of the
United States," explains the council's Ken Miller. "If
something is legitimately new and innovative, they let it
go ahead." Miller is vaguely aware of the sexual nature of
the courses but allows that there has been "lots of research
with Masters and Johnson." He has not visited the campus.
Nor has the council's official in charge of More, Dr.
Betty Sundberg, who, like Miller, was unaware of the
1986 report of state investigators Elms and Laval. Sundberg
says that More University recently applied for renewal of
its approved status, which must be recertified every five
years. Another inspection team will soon be scheduled.
Miller concedes that the process will be "interesting."
Roz Elms is currently an administrator at the University of Northern Colorado. When she was told that,
eight years after her site-review visit, this '60s timecapsule continues to grant degrees with the state of
California's approval, she reacts with stunned disbelief
and anger.
"I'm appalled," Elms says. "I can't believe they
didn't close that place," which she ranks with academic
bottom-feeders such as acupuncture schools and "a guy
who was granting doctorates out of a two-bedroom apartment."
California educrats have made life difficult for a
number of private schools, particularly religious schools,
even those whose academic achievement is unquestioned
and whose faculty -boast impeccable credentials. And yet
the state has allowed More to thrive since 1979—fifteen
years—for the most part undisturbed. Bureaucratic indifference and ineptitude alone cannot explain More's incredible longevity.
California's approval of More stands as a symbol of
how American society has been baptized in the ethos of
the '60s, An institution like More University could only
thrive in the kind of society the '60s helped to create, a
society in which, as the late Malcolm Muggeridge put it,
"sex is the only mysticism."
—BY K.L BILLINGSLEY
HETERODOXY
DEBUNKING
RELATIVISM
Sick Societies: Challenging the
Myth of Primitive Harmony By
Robert B. Edgerton, Reviewed
by Glynn Custred Maxwell
Macmillian International, 278
pp., $24.95
C
haracteristic of the thinking and rhetoric of
the cultural left are two sharply opposed
social types. On the one hand there are
small scale, face-to-face folk communities that are
inherently harmonious, stable and satisfying to
their members, while on the other there is Western
Civilization which is inherently alienating, vicious
and rapacious, a society that demeans its members
and corrupts and destroys the innocent communities with which it comes in contact.
A good example of this stereotype is Kirkpatrick Sale's
The Conquest of Paradise, a polemic against Christopher
Columbus, and thus against Western Civilization. Sale depicts pre-contact Indians as members of idyllic "primal
communities" living "harmonious, peaceful, benign and content" in an ecological paradise—until Columbus brought the
wickedness of the West to their shores to wantonly destroy
them and to disrupt the harmony of nature. Left out of Sale's
depiction is the extinction of entire species, such as the horse
and the camel, in large part due to the hunting practices of the
first Americans, something archaeologists have called the
"Pleistocene Overkill." Also left out of Sale's picture of
primeval harmony are the warfare, cannibalism and bondage
that characterized much of Native America long before
Columbus ever sailed from Spain.
Edgerton' s numerous examples are presented not as an
indictment of old societies or as a vindication of modern
Western culture. All he is doing is exposing the myth of
primitive harmony and the simplistic notion of relativism on
which it rests. In its place, he suggests that we examine
customs in terms of their degree of adaptability, using such
measures as to what extent societies or traditions ensure the
survival of cultures and populations, to what extent they
advance the population's physical well-being and to what
degree they contribute to people's satisfaction with their
lives.
The crude stereotypes of the Noble Savage and the
Wicked West have, recently emerged in revisionist versions
of the western. A striking example is the Academy Awardwinning film Dances with Wolves. This story of a deserter
from civilization who finds primal happiness among the
Sioux tells us far more about trendy Hollywood in the 1990s
than it ever could about the real Plains Indians of the 1860s.
What is most disturbing about this reductionist, and thus
misrepresentative, image of culture and history is that it is
gaining ground in our educational institutions under the
PAGE 15
rubrics of "diversity" and "multiculturalism;"
The scholarly discipline best positioned to debunk
this stereotype is social and cultural anthropology. Yet
because anthropologists are caught up in a folk culture of
their own, they are very often incapable of clear thinking
about true cultural variability; in fact, they help create the
cultural cliches described above* An essential part of anthropological inquiry is the adoption of a kind of cultural
relativity, in the sense of trying to understand another
society on its own terms and to see it from the perspective
of those who live in it. Another important part of anthropology is functionalism, the examination of interrelationships
among customs and practices and how they help populations adapt to their conditions. When properly brought
together, anthropologist Robert B. Edgerton observes, cultural relativity and functionalism can "produce finely textured portraits of life in other cultures" and provide "the
essential descriptive material without which neither cultural
comparison nor evaluation can take place."
Unfortunately, what characterizes much of anthropology today is not cultural relativity or functionalism
properly understood, but rather a simplified relativism that
precludes evaluation and a naive assumption that just because an institution or custom exists in a society, it must
necessarily be adaptive. Thus anthropologists have interpreted customs such as torture, female genital mutilation,
human sacrifice, etc., in ways that sometimes contradict the
very data presented in their ethnographies. In fact, anthropologists have gone so far in this respect that Arthur Hippler
has criticized them for regarding "anything and everything
done in some non-Western culture...as good or at least
neutral, [while] everything done in or by Western society is
somehow bad." In the same vein, W.E. Washburn has
attributed the "continuing power" of cultural relativism to
the hostility shown by anthropologists towards the values of
their own society.
Finally, however, a rioted anthropologist, Robert B.
Edgerton of the University of California Los Angeles, has
come along to challenge these popular myths in his book
Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony.
Edgerton notes the success of modern societies in feeding-;
their people and in maintaining their health. "The average
life expectancy in the United States, Japan and Europe," he
writes, "is more than twice that ever attained by any folk
society and indeed three times that of many."
In contrast to this achievement, he cites the Siriano, a
foraging people of eastern Bolivia. The Siriano are often
hungry and cold, and they suffer from malaria and skin
disease, hookworm, dysentery and other maladies caused
by malnutrition and a primitive technology. The Siriano
have no remedies against snakebite and other dangers they
face every day nor do they have surgical skills. They cannot
even set broken bones, their, sick are left unattended and
exposed to the cold and the rain and their children are
permitted to play with their feces. It's hard to see how any
of this can be considered adaptive.
An example of a practice that is plainly maladaptive is
found among East African pastdralists. These people do not
remove flies from the eyes of their children because they
associate flies with the feces of cattle, and cattle represent
wealth. So the children are at serious risk of blindness
caused by fly-borne trachoma. "The benefit to a society of
blind children is not self evident," notes Edgerton. Some
dietary practices also contribute to unnecessarily high mortality rates. One example is the eating of cattle that have died
from anthrax; another is the Inuit (Eskimo) habit of eating
seal blubber raw rather than cooked, thus causing the death
of countless people from botulism.
Edgerton also cites vital statistics for the male dominated and warlike Yanomamo of the Amazon jungle, where
.43 percent of all females born alive die before their first year
(perhaps as many as half due to female infanticide) and
where only 22 percent of the entire population lives beyond
the age of 30. The rate is even lower among the Xavante of
Brazil, where only about 15.4 percent lived past 30. Clearly,
customs in these societies have not served their people well.
The pre-contact Aztecs provide another case. Aztecs
waged constant war against their neighbors, not for territory, but rather for captives whom they sacrificed to their
demanding gods. Aztec priests would cut out the living
hearts of their victims, then topple their bodies down the
steep pyramid steps to be butchered, seasoned, cooked and
eaten, apparently with relish. Perhaps some case can be
made for the adaptiveness of these customs in terms of the
accumulation of power and wealth by the Aztec elite, but
little advantage can be seen for those neighboring societies
that furnished literally thousands of victims each year for
Aztec sacrifices. People from the societies thus exploited
eagerly joined the Spaniards against their oppressors.
Another example of a maladaptive custom is the kind
of cannibalism practiced by theTonkawa of Central Texas.
This custom served no ceremonial purpose, but was instead
pursued for the enjoyment of eating human flesh. Other
tribes were repulsed by the custom and eventually joined
together against the Tonkawa in a war in which half the
Tonkawa population was slaughtered. Cannibalism was
therefore far from adaptive for those who practiced it.
Human sacrifice is another custom that is hard to justify.
Edgerton gives the example of the Skidi Pawnee of Nebraska who, in order to propitiate the Morning Star, would
regularly torture and kill a child. Other tribes which, like the
Pawnee, had adapted to the Great Plains did not adopt such
a ritual.
The great majority of the people of the world have
engaged in warfare and feuding. The result is often high
levels of stress for those involved, and in some cases serious
disruptions and the depletion of population. The Kaingang
of the Amazon jungle are a case in point: their feuding
eventually reduced the population by 75 percent. Anthropologist Jules Henry has described their pattern of behavior
as "cultural suicide." Another people on the way to selfannihilation before contact with Europeans stopped the
process were the Kaiadit of Native Australia. The purpose
of the feuds that characterized their society was a struggle
over women, not for their economic value, but rather for
sex. As Edgerton puts it, "Kaiadit men killed other Kaiadit
men in order to take their women."
Edgerton cites another instructive example, the
Marind-amin of New Guinea. There, a bride was forced
to have multiple intercourse on her wedding night with
the groom's kinsmen, a practice repeated at various
intervals during her life. This resulted in a high rate of
severe pelvic inflammatory disease and, as a consequence, sterility. One way of maintaining their numbers
was to raid neighboring communities, where the heads of
the men were taken as trophies and the children carried
away to be raised as Marind-amin. What these and other
examples show is that the natural harmony of folk societies is a myth and that many beliefs and practices can
often lead to serious problems, in some cases even to the
demise of the community itself.
Edgerton also notes that people in folk communities
are not uniformly content with their customs. For example,
many Bimin-Kuskusmin of Africa told anthropologist
Fitzjohn Poole that although they took part in socially
proper cannibalistic practices, they were nonetheless ambivalent towards the custom, while some even expressed
"horror and disgust at their own acts." They said that "they
had been unable to engage in the act, had not completed it,
had vomited or even fainted, or had hidden the prescribed
morsel and had lied about consuming it."
Many Yanomano said they disliked the perennial
warfare which characterized their culture, and the women of
the Mae Enga people of New Guinea said that they detested
the warfare practiced by their men. Chronic warfare was a
prominent fact of life in highland New Guinea before it was
banned by a colonial government, and afterwards many
men freely admitted that "they had been terribly afraid when
there had been warfare and that their lives were better since
the government had prevented it."
There is also the example of a Pawnee chief who took
steps oh his own, without outside influence, to end the
torture and killing of children in the Morning-Star ceremony. And then there is the example of Tecumseh, the
Shawnee war chief who attempted to rally the Woodlands
Indians against white encroachment in the early nineteenth
century. Tecumseh, a great warrior and a remarkable man
by any standard, was disgusted with the practice of torturing
captured enemies. As a youth he spoke out against it, saying
that there was no honor in torturing to death a helpless
prisoner. What all this shows, says Edgerton, is that the
"people in small, traditional societies object to some aspects
of their culture, just as people do in complex, postindustrial
societies like our own." Moreover, customs may be questioned, criticized and eventually abandoned in such communities as indeed they often are in modern society. This
presents us with a picture of human beings that are far more
similar than the relativists would have us believe.
Sick Societies is a refreshing and much needed book,
a welcome antidote to the debased cultural relativism now
widespread both in popular culture and in educational
institutions.
GLYNN CUSTRED is a professor of anthropology at\CalState Hay ward.
Paolo Casorti International Cello Competition
Announces Winner
by JUDITH SCHUMANN WEIZNER
E
llie Susstraum has been awarded first prize
in the Sixth Paolo Casorti International
Cello Competition. The thirty-six year old
woman is the oldest person ever to have won the
prestigious quadrennial contest since its inception
in 1970.
At Carnegie Hall today, Ms. Susstraum was presented with fifty thousand dollars and the use of the
Stradivari cello, that the Paolo Casorti Foundation lends
to the winner for the four-year period between competitions. The foundation will also finance her future New
York Philharmonic debut.
Ms. Susstraum's inspiring journey to the winner's
circle was an arduous one, following her near-miraculous
recovery from injuries sustained in an accident six years
ago. At that time, Ms. Susstraum was a doctoral student
in ethnomusieology at the Grove School of Music of
Manhattan University, For her thesis she had undertaken
to learn to play every musical instrument native to
Uzbekistan prior to the Second World War and to write a
book of instruction for each one in the hope of stimulating
interest in those instruments among the public at large.
Additionally, she secured a commission to write concertos
for the various instruments, which she performed with the
Grove School of Music Orchestra in a series of concerts
held in Carnegie Hall.
Critics hailed her as a genius of unusual breadth,
citing the stylistic variety of the concertos as well as the
sensitivity of her performances.
While preparing for one of these concerts, Ms.
Susstraum, having arrived early for a rehearsal, heard an
instrument being practiced backstage. Intrigued by the
plaintiveness of its upper register, which seemed the
perfect vehicle to give voice to the yearning of the
oppressed, she inquired what the instrument was. Told
that it was a cello, she decided on the spot to search for a
cello teacher when she was hit by a taxi while crossing the
street. The accident condemned her to eight months in
traction, followed by four months of physical therapy at
the Institute for Rehabilitation.
As soon as she was discharged from the Institute,
she undertook a project that had taken shape in her mind
during her long convalescence. Having read extensively
about liability law to help pass the time in traction, she filed
suit against the taxi driver, the taxi company and the City
of New York for recovery of expenses incurred due to the
accident, as well as compensation for pain and suffering.
Although several witnesses testified that she had entered
the crosswalk against the light and had stopped in the
middle of the intersection to examine a run in her panty
hose, the jury was quick to award her compensation for her
medical expenses.
The issue of pain and suffering was somewhat
thornier. She based her claim on the contention that due to
the accident she could not play the cello. The defendant's
attorney pointed out that Ms. Susstraum, as far as anyone
knew, had never even held a cello, so it wasn't surprising
that she couldn't play one. Ms. Susstraum was able to
prove, however, that she had been considering studying
the cello for over two years and, basing her argument on
the hitherto little-known precedent established in
Sacrevache v. Hudson River Employment Agency, in
end of 1997, has been hailed as the world's first truly
humane musical competition. (While the event is still
referred to by its old name, Casorti Foundation directors
must find a designation for the 1998 International Paolo
Casorti Cello Competition that will more accurately reflect its nature.) The guidelines were imposed by the
Federal Health Administration after a study showed that
such competitions often resulted in an increase in medical
costs as non-winners sought psychological counseling to
restore their damaged self-esteem. A panel of contest
sponsors and government officials working together
developed the guidelines as way of awarding prizes
without fostering a climate of competition.
In the past, young artists were judged on the basis
of such criteria as accuracy of pitch and rhythm, tonal
beauty, stylistic appropriateness, interpretive imagination
and stage presence. The panel, after hearing extensive
testimony, concluded that while such things as pitch and
rhythm could be judged by somewhat objective
standards, the very act of forcing people of artistic
temperament to conform to these external standards
could be a cause of severe stress. The panel also concluded that judgement of more subjective matters such as
beauty of tone and interpretation were likely to be too
vague, promoting confusion in the young musicians who
could never be sure exactly what was expected of them.
The panel also found that any of these factors could be
affected by a participant's state of mind, health or
preparedness, giving an unfair advantage to those who
had slept well the night before the competition. Like-.
wise, inequalities of physique, talent and musical training
could favor the physically or musically gifted and the
financially well-off. Accordingly, when this year's
competition was announced, no criteria for entry were
given. The sole requirement was submission of an essay
entitled "Why I Want to Enter the Sixth Paolo Casorti
International Cello Competition."
From among the 3,000 entrants, 30 semi-finalists
were chosen at random and given the option of playing
a recital. The atmosphere was electric at Carnegie Hall
last evening when Ms. Susstraum was declared the
winner after a paper bearing her name was drawn from a
fishbowl containing the names of all 30 semifinalists.
ELLIE SUSSTRAUM
In addition to making history as the oldest winner
of the first non-competition contest, Ms. Susstraum is also
which the loss of a long-held dream was deemed grounds
for compensation, she was able to convince the jury to making history as the first winner of the Paolo Casorti
International Cello Competition who has never actually
award her $4.5 million as balm for her disappointment.
This award afforded Ms. Susstraum the financial played the cello.
"Getting hit by that cab was the best thing that ever
freedom to have a cello customized to suit her unusual
physical needs. Since her left arm can no longer open out happened to me," Ms. Susstraum said in an interview in
the green room today. "It gave me graphic proof that the
from the elbow, she designed and patented a motorized,
pedal-operated device that moves the cello back and forth most important thing in life is to pursue one's dream no
matter how impossible it may seem."
to compensate for her inability to draw the bow across the
strings.
The 1994 Paolo Casorti International Cello Competition, the first to be held under the federal Guidelines for JUDITH SCHUMANN WEIZNER'S last piece
appeared in our January issue.
Artistic Contests that will apply to all such events by the