Take On the Talking Heads
Bring On the Clowns
by Garry Wills
of Wealth
Jan. 27, 2000 -- I am very proud of my country. It is, after all, the country of Washington and Madison and Lincoln. But at times it seems it is more the country of Jesse Helms, Garry Bauer and Arthur Ravenel. That, at least, is the impression conveyed when the three men are prominent in the news on the same day, as just occurred.
Senator Helms went to the United Nations to tell that organization what "the American people think," a phrase Helms uses over and over when he should be saying "what I think." It is an insult to the country to imply that we are all a bunch of yahoos who believe black helicopters are about to buzz off the roof of the U.N. building, like malevolent bees, to paralyze our freedoms with their sting. Helms warned the members that the American people are on guard against "a United Nations that seeks to impose its presumed authority on the American people."
Helms was attacking a menace that fumes through his own undernourished brain, but not through the minds of "the American people," that unitary construct of Helms' own invention. It is libel of Americans to say, "The American people will never accept the United Nations' claim to be the sole voice of legitimacy on the use of force in this world." That is a claim the U.N. has never made. Helms referred to no document of the body that would bear such an absurd interpretation.
He was using his threat that "the American people" might withdraw from the U.N. in order to cover our own deadbeat record of shirking our dues to the body. He brought with him a set of cooked figures that confused military costs we have undertaken on U.N.-supported initiatives we would have pursued even without U.N. cooperation with dues and other obligations. He neglected the military costs -- and the investment of military personnel in similar missions -- incurred by other countries, who do not use those costs to avoid paying their dues.
Then, on the same day, I heard Garry Bauer defend his claim that a Vermont ruling on gay partners was "worse than terrorism." When I read his assertion, I thought it must be an unconsidered slip; but, no, I then heard him on TV bringing up the words again in order to give them a serious defense. He said that if we let the Vermont decision on gays stand, we cannot prevent "a man from turning up with three wives." The obscure connections are two -- between gay partners and polygamy, and between polygamy and terrorism. If a guy shows up with three Uzis, that would be terrorism. How am I threatened in life and limb if he shows up with three wives?
Bauer's reasoning seems to track with the infamous notion put about by Robert Bork that pornography is wrong because some people feel threatened by the thought that other people are consuming it. Mr. Bauer is easily terrified. The thought of gay partners has him quaking in his tiny boots -- not the kind of performance we want from a leader of the most powerful nation in the world.
Finally, there is Arthur Ravenel, the South Carolina state senator who called the NAACP "the National Association of Retarded People," and when challenged said that he would apologize to retarded people, but not to the NAACP. George W. Bush, who is cozying up to Mr. Ravenel's fellow defenders of the Confederate flag in South Carolina, has repeatedly refused to say that Ravenel should apologize to the NAACP.
Shouldn't someone form a national bigots club where these men can meet and regale each other with what they think the American people think, while the rest of us get back to the country of Washington and Madison and Lincoln?
Copyright © 2000 Universal Press Syndicate
