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F
athoming the depths of
Whitewater isn't L. J. Davis's
only headache these days.
The 53-year-old journalist's
skull still hurts from a disturbing incident that occurred on Valentine's
Day. Davis, a contributing editor
at Harper's magazine, was in Little Rock
doing research for his April 4 New
Republic cover story on Arkansas's rich
tapestry of interwoven financial and political deals.
After spending a week reviewing financial documents and interviewing
people in Little Rock and such fabled
towns as Russellville (home of Park-OMeter, a parking meter company at the
heart of former Associate Attorney General Webster Hubbell's billing fraud dispute with the Rose Law Firm) and Mena
(site of alleged gun and drug running to
Central America in the 1980s), Davis went
to his room at the Legacy Hotel at about
6:30 p.m. to dress for dinner.
"The last thing I remember is
unlocking the door of room 502 to go in,"
Davis says. "The next thing I remember,
four hours later, at 10:30 at night, was
waking up on the floor of the foyer of
my hotel room partially paralyzed with a
lump the size of a darning egg over my
left ear."
Davis says his doctor found his injury inconsistent with a fall. "There was
nothing to hit my head on. I was not drunk.
There was no furniture in the foyer." Davis
says his doctor told him that he was "struck
with a powerful blow above the left ear.'*
Due to the concussion he suffered, Davis
says he felt he was walking on a trampoline for three days after the
incident. He continues to take medication to dissolve a blood clot
in his brain. He adds that the trauma-related amnesia blocked out
exactly what happened and that he "may never recover that
memory."
Davis doubts he was the victim of a robbery gone awry.
When he woke up, his watch was still on his wrist and his wallet
still contained a couple of hundred bucks.
He did discover, he says, that "about
four pages of my notebook in a very
significant portion were half torn out."
Davis says he now regrets not heeding warnings he had received from the
office of a "high government official" in
Washington before he left for Arkansas.
"The exact phrase they used was,
'You've gotten into a red zone.' " He
says his contact urged him to "Work
your ass off and get out of there as fast as
possible." This official also told him to
"think Danny Casolaro"—a reference
to another independent journalist who
was found dead with his wrists slit in the
bathtub of his West Virginia hotel room
on August 10,1991, while he was investigating links between the Iran-Contra
affair, the BCCI scandal, the so-called
October Surprise and other controversies of the 1980s.
On March 8, about three hours after he sent a partial draft of his story to
The New Republic by modem, Davis
says his phone rang. "What you're doing makes Lawrence Walsh look like a
rank amateur," a man with a rich, baritone voice said with neither words of
greeting nor introduction. "Who is this?"
Davis asked. "Seems to me you've gotten your bell rung too many times," the
man responded. "But did you hear what
I just said?" Davis only managed to
reply, "Yes, I did. Is this —." Before he
could finish, the man at the other end
hung up the phone. This cryptic conversation puzzles Davis. "Somebody seems
Please turn to page 6
A Professor Looks Back at the Radical Years
LOST HORIZONS
by VICTOR COMERCHERO
Between the 60s, when the campus
newspaper described me as "the
point man" for radical change at
California State University at Sacramento (CSUS), and the 80s, when, in
the words of one colleague, I
"declared war on the radicals" (a war
that caused a minor campus sensation
and was reported in a lengthy feature
article in the Sacramento Bee called
"The Astounding About-Face of a
Rebel Professor"), I experienced the
crack-up of my "progressive" faith.
For years it had faltered; then suddenly it failed altogether.
The decades bracketed by these
cal activity followed by long periods
of bear-like hibernation. Politics has
always seemed to me to be a brutal
way of shaping social discourse, and
while I have been reasonably effective at this game, for me it is soulkilling work. Besides, anger is a
young man's game, and there is no
more ugly sight than an angry old
man. So, as I've watched the corruption by the Left of my early ideals,
I've tried with the passing years simply to follow the tragic movement of
campus politics and to allow my anger to be transmuted into sorrow, a
process which led me a couple of
Perce: "I will fight no more forever."
Still, my youngest son is now
a freshman in college, and the relentless indoctrination is brutal,
unapologetic, and administratively
sanctioned. So the battle begins
anew, although my chosen weapon
now is the reminiscence rather than
the soapbox.
Looking back on the events
of my life in the 60s, I find it hard,
in all honesty, not to see it in stark,
even melodramatic, terms, as a
history of misunderstanding, of
closeted ambition and ironic role
PAGE 2
APRIL 1994
FIGHTING WORDS
I believe basic civility and decorum demand that every
respectable journal shuns certain words, regardless of who
else uses them. I hope in the future you will abide by basic
policies of civility and decorum. Every breach of these
simple, basic, essential virtues, yes, virtues demean all of
us.
V. F. Massman Saint
Paul MN
DON'T RECYCLE THIS LETTER!
I thought the pinhead who wrote the anonymous letter to
the editor in last month's Heterodoxy might like this
excerpt from UCLA visiting economics professor Ben
Zycher's class syllabus. Describing the text for his "Public
Finance" course, he writes: "The textbook (Harvey S.
Rosen, Public Finance, 3rd ed., Richard D. Irwin, 1992) is
quite good, although it is printed on recycled paper, the use
of which adds to the toxic sludge problem, reduces (yes,
reduces) the number of trees in the world, increases solid
waste costs, and weakens incentives for efficient pricing of
landfill use and siting. We would boycott this book were
there an alternative close in quality and printed on virgin
paper." Makes you want to think twice about recycling.
Karen M. Holian
Los Angeles, CA
P.S. The class was one of the best I've taken.
RUSH: A'CORPULENT CHICKEN HAWK*
Thank you for sending me your information about your
new organization. While I agree with almost everything
your organization seeks to accomplish, I must regrettably
decline your offer to participate.
The reason is because you make the mistake that so
many others have made. By championing the cause of that
despicable, draft dodging idiot Rush Limbaugh, you reveal
that your organization is yet another in a series of sham
organizations that only serve to line the pockets of this
corpulent chicken hawk.
If indeed your organization is serious about doing
anything other than acting as a platform for his uninformed,
draft dodging, college dropout viewpoints, then I wish you
well. However, as long as you have any connection to him
I must decline your offer.
Unsigned
me is the blatant attempt at threats and intimidation, all in the
name of supposed tolerance and "sensitivity"! Ha! Ha! Just
goes to show what happens when you shine the light of truth
and reason on those who take themselves ever so seriously.
Keep up the good work!
Janet P.McAuliffe
Happy Wife and Mother
P.S. "Final Analysis" is also priceless!
HOORAY FOR HOMO-CONS
Best wishes to David Brock, now able to come in from the
cold (Jeff Muir's article, Mar '94, pp 9-10). A mere two years
ago, many conservatives would have thrown him to the
wolves. I suspect he might, off the record, express some
gratitude to such pioneers as Bruce Bawer, who put the term
"gay conservative" on the political map. Indeed, like Bawer,
IT'S LATER THAN YOU THINK
I am in full agreement with what you are doing. Unfortu- he might even have a good word for some gay leftists, whose
nately, since I am 76 and living on a small, fixed income, earlier work made Frank Rich's cute smear campaign no
there is nothing I can do financially to help. Cash is longer defensible. (But what a relief! He is no longer forced
especially short now after a cold Wisconsin winter with to choose between the "closet" and a "progressive coalition"
including such noted gay rights activists as Louis Farrakhan
high fuel and electricity bills, etc...
As I look back over the last 50 or 60 years, I am and Fidel Castro).
Hugo S. Cunningham
appalled to see how much personal liberty we have already
Boston, MA
lost. The Bill of Rights is being attacked on all fronts; the
most recent example is the unconstitutional methods used
by the feds in the war on drugs. Even worse is ahead in the KEEP THROWING BOMBS
coming war against tobacco and the war against unconven- Cease and desist all publication! You're confusing everytional religion. Here in Wisconsin, the D.N.R. seeks to get body with the facts. What kind of a country do you think this
legal right to force farmers to comply with nitpicking, very is? What are you trying to do, ruin the status quo? If you
costly rules that really accomplish nothing but force small continue to print the truth instead of media innuendo and
farmers out of business.
partisan politics, how are all the other news media going to
Robert Schmall survive? You're just adding to the problem by driving liberal
Soldiers Grove, WI myopic reporters and newscasters into the ranks of the
unemployed. I hope, I hope, I hope.
MORE VENOM, PLEASE
JA. Conover
Although I love your entire publication and regularly read
it from cover to cover, one of my favorite features is your RENO IS BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE
printing of letters, particularly those of your PC-crazed, I believe you slipped in the article on Janet ("The Butcher of
foaming-at-the-mouth detractors. These venomous Waco") Reno. You treated as fact her claim that "they set the
communiques positively drip with hatred, though carefully fires...they brought it on themselves/'
crafted to showcase the supposed moral/intellectual supeThere is scant evidence supporting the "blame the
riority and purity of the reaction. What particularly amuses
victims" attitude, and much evidence that the attackers
directly or indirectly caused the fires. I've viewed
considerable footage of the Waco matter, and although
some of it is ambiguous (the media was kept at extreme
distance) some footage clearly shows either a tankmounted flame-thrower or tank-mounted artillery firing
into the compound.
It is also known that the tear gas canisters are hotburning and considered a fire hazard. The tear gas also,
in heavy concentrations, becomes an explosive vapor in
the air. I've discussed the matter with numerous military
explosive specialists. All agree that the actions of the
attackers could easily have caused the fires and explosions.
It should also be noted that the attackers chose to
mount their assault on a windy day when resulting fires
could not be controlled. Also, note that their casual
contempt for the law and life was such that they did not
even have the phone number of the local fire departments, much less have fire trucks and ambulances standing by!
Finally, I note that much will remain forever conjecture. After having barred independent experts from
inspecting the Waco remains while she conducted her
own whitewash-style investigation, Reno recently leveled the remains and plowed them under. Honest investigators will never have the chance to document the truth,
and Reno has probably forever protected herself and
Slick Willie from criminal charges and lawsuits by destroying the physical evidence.
Thanks for your great article about "The Butcher of
Waco."
I had no idea that she was eyeballs deep in pseudo
child-abuse profiteering.
Leroy Jones
Studio City, CA
HETERODOXY
PAGE 3
REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM
FATE OF THE FISHWIFE: In the current issue of
Lingua France, Jane Tompkins, wife of Stanley Fish, and
author of "scholarly" books about reader-response theory,
etc., tells author Adam Begley that she derives satisfaction
from working weekends as a cook in a Durham restaurant
called the Wellspring Grocery. She calls her new job part
of "a trajectory of personal development" and hints that it
may eventually lead to a complete severing of her ties wife
the university. Members of the Fish family have always
been blessed with keen early warning detectors. Everyone
concerned with the fate of literary studies should hope that
once again they are on the cutting edge; that Tompkins'
trajectory continues, and that others of her ilk consider
similar career moves.
catch up with them and tack on penalties which would
adjust the payment back up to where it should have been.
If more people had been as farsighted and altruistic as the
Clintons, we could retroactively erase the deficit"
—Eleanor Clift, April 1, McLaughlih Group
IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER: According to an
Associated Press report from Minneapolis, a Walker Art
Center member contacted state health officials about a
Walker-sponsored event in which observers said one performer cut another, mopped up the blood with towels and
sent them soaring over the audience on revolving clotheslines. An audience member at the March 5 performance
called health officials to ask whether spectators were at risk
of contracting the AIDS virus if blood had dripped on them.
JUST PLAIN BERNADINE: Recently some
law professors around the country were surprised
to get an invitation from Lawrence Fox of the
Labor Relations and Employment Law Society at
LUNA BEACH By Carl Moore
St John's University informing them of an April
13 lecture by former Weatherman leader
Bernadine Dohrn. In his letter, Fox described
Dohrn as having "manifested an eloquent lifelong commitment to issues of social justice.
" This will give a chuckle to those who remember
her as a suck to Fidel Castro in the early 70s, as part
of an operation attempting to plant bombs at the
social functions of U.S. servicemen, and as an
advocate of terrorism during her days in the
underground. Bernadine presumably does not suffer
from the aphasia afflicting Mr. Fox, but she has
chosen not speak about the obscenities in her past
since negotiating her way back into respectable
society. During her appearance at St John's, she
lectured the audience on "workplace child care,
sexism and sexual harassment proposed health
reform, and related feminist issues." Donna Shalala,
move over!
GOOD RIDDANCE: Arsenio Hall has given
notice. After threatening to "kick Jay Leno's ass" in
the late night television wars, he has surrendered
and decided to cancel his show. It is too bad he didn't
make this decision a few weeks ago. If he had,
America would have been spared the sight of Hall
slobbering over the likes of Snoop Doggy Dog and
Louis Farrakhan. Hall's "interview" with the racist
Farrakhan, whom he fawningly questioned on life
and society as if he were Albert Schweitzer, will stand
as one of the truly shameful moments in television
history.
SINGAPORE, USA: A recent issue of The Gay
and Lesbian Times advertised an upcoming
"Leatherfest Workshop" in San Diego. Among the
sessions offered were "a demonstration and discussion
of the correct technique for fire play"; The ABC's of
branding; and "discussion of the sensually pleasurable
manipulation of the anal canal with the hand and
sometimes forearm." There was also a workshop mat
managed to resonate with current events. It was Caning: "A
demonstration of the different types of canes, where and
how they originated, and how it has progressed over the
many years of existence. The beauty, emotion and severity
will be demonstrated."
WHEELCHAIRING IN THE RAIN: In a Reuters dispatch, it was reported that the Odd Ball Cabaret of Los
Angeles was ordered by city officials to close its main
attraction, a shower enclosure where nude dancers cavort
for male customers, because the enclosure had no wheelchair access and thus denied people who use wheelchairs
equal opportunity to work as nude dancers. In one of the
great bureaucratic understatements, Ron Shigeta, head of
LA's Disabled Access Division, said "the law is the law, no
matter how ridiculous it might seem to some people."
Rich Danilla, supervisor of the AIDS epidemiology unit,
said that the caller was told there was "low risk unless
someone actually got the blood into their mouth, an eye, or
an open sore." Walker Director Kathy Halbreich told the
Star Tribune that the performance in which Ron Athey cut
Darryl Carlton should be understood in the context of
contemporary art and historical and religious precedent,
including "the rituals of the church and the body and blood
of Christ being used." This comment managed to be inane
and sacreligious in one gesture.
NIXON'S THE ONE: Richard Nixon must have died a
little more comfortably because of Pavel Sudoplatov's
Special Tasks, which was published a week or so before his
stroke. The former Soviet spymaster made a series of
startling revelations about the brutal world of Soviet espionage that should redden the faces of those in this country
who apologized for the USSR for years and then, when that
became too embarrassing, began to propound theories of
"moral equivalence" between the Soviets and the U.S.
Sudoplatov talks about arranging to please Stalin with the
THE DEVIL MADE THEM DO IT: "Hillary and Bill assassination of Trotsky. He admits that Raoul Wallenberg
cheating on their taxes was a protest against Reagan era tax was "eliminated" in a Soviet prison for refusing to cooperbreaks for the wealthy. Many middle class and wealthy ate. He fingers Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as "a naive
people deliberately paid less than mid-1980s tax rates couple overeager to cooperate with us." In other words,
required. They knew that in five or ten years the IRS would Special Tasks is filled with food for thought and food that
old lefties will choke on. Sudoplatov's most startling claim
may be his contention that physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer
shared information about the newly developed atomic
bomb with Soviet scientific contacts. Oppenheimer, made
into a tormented martyr by the American left in the postwar
era, apparently leaked information for reasons which were
in a way more venal than comparable actions by traitors out
for financial or purely ideological gain: he was fearful of
the consequences should U.S. maintain a nuclear monopoly. In other words Oppenheimer was not so much proSoviet as anti-American, and thus a metaphor for the next
two generations of leftists in this country. But if the revelations concerning Oppenheimer are the most sensational of
Special Tasks, those involving Alger Hiss must have been
of special interest to Richard Nixon. For the Hiss case, of
course, was entwined with the development of his own
legend. It was the first of his "crises"; the point in his
career when he began to understand the extent of communist subversion in America and thus sensed the stakes of
the titanic postwar struggle between the U.S.
and the USSR. For Nixon's opponents, of
course, his involvement in the Hiss case as the
leading member of the House Un-American
Activities Committee and a sponsor of Hiss's
accuser and (they would say) tormentor,
Whittaker Chambers, made him a marked man.
Ever after "destroying" Hiss he would be
Tricky Dick, cynic and opportunist, who
would stop at nothing in his ruthless climb to
power—a neurotic whose frayed cuff
upbringing made him implacably hostile to
those with a touch of class like Hiss; a politician
whose discovery of anti communism provided
him with a vehicle he would drive to the heart of
American dream. Attention would always be
paid to other Nixon "victims" like Jerry
Voorhis and Helen Gahagan Douglas, but the
fine art of Nixon-hating as it developed over
the years always came back to the alleged persecution of Hiss. It was this episode in his career
that stamped Nixon as the id of American
politics, the dark-jowled figure whose
ambition, coming in contact with his paranoia,
caused a mephitic steam to arise from his
public acts. It was never absolutely necessary
that Hiss be innocent for Nixon to be guilty.
But the fellow traveling left has always
assumed that even if he wasn't absolutely
beyond suspicion, Hiss's most notable public act
was to become one of Richard Nixon's
victims. The image of Nixon staring intently
at the one time adviser to Roosevelt who was
president of the Carnegie Endowment when he
made his appearance before HUAC in 1948
would be part of Nixon's legend: the mongoose
measuring his prey. But now comes Pavel Sudoplatov
with something to say about Hiss and it is not (as the
egregious Roger Morris and other Nixon-bashing
biographers have said) that Hiss was victimized by an
unholy alliance between Nixon and Chambers. On the
contrary, Hiss had an "official confidential relationship"
with Soviet espionage agents and was especially close to
the GRU, Soviet military intelligence. He was a source of
intelligence for the central spy group in Washington DC,
and when Chambers testified against him it was considered
"a setback for the Soviet Union." This is the sort of revelation one would expect to touch off a delayed self-inventory
on the part of the left. Nixon was right; they were wrong.
All the grudging admissions about his brilliant insights into
foreign policy are one thing—especially when they are
hedged by the obligatory words on personal corruption and
Watergate. But what needs to happen is for those who were
his opponents the whole of Nixon's career finally to say the
unsayable. He was right about the biggest issue of his day—
the "communist menace" and the willingness of American
leftists and their fellow travelers to betray their country,
and, once betrayal was no longer fashionable, to continue
secretly to despise it.
PAGE 4
APRIL 1994
CBS and the Writer's Guild Make a Barrio in Hollywood
Half-Price Hispanics
by K.L. BILLINGSLEY
SCREENWRITERS WANTED for network television shows. Previous experience unnecessary. Talent optional. Must
be Latino and willing to work for half
pay. No anglos or blacks need apply.
CBS did not actually run an ad like this in
Variety or the Hollywood Reporter. It didn't
have to. Late last year, when the network made
an informal pitch along these lines, there were
many takers. But injecting racial quotas into the
television writing business wasn't the idea of
CBS management alone. The Writers Guild of
America, the union of film, television and radio
writers, was in on it The collaboration involved
both the Guild leadership and the Latino Writers
Committee, one of the union's many official
caucuses for "protected classes."
On the surface, this move to bring minorities into the
television scriptwriting business would seem to be just
another of those "progressive" gestures that the entertainment industry occasionally wallows in—the sort of gesture
that some may secretly smile at, as in the case of wearing
all the color-coded ribbons on Oscar night, but go along
with anyhow; But in this case, some WGA writers, including a number of Latinos, saw the CBS-WGA move as the
creation of a kind of artistic apartheid.
"Hollywood may be trying to recreate
an entertainment version of the old Negro
Leagues—with Latinos—separate and unequal
treatment of one particular ethnic minority," says
Migdia Chinea-Varela, a Cuban-American who
has written for The Incredible Hulk, Facts of Life,
Punky Brewsterm A other series over the years.
And Julio Vera, also born in Cuba, who has
written pilots for CBS and ABC, adds, "It is
ironic that the Guild, which represents some of
America's best known liberals, is now engaged
in a brand new form of segregation."
Yet the Writers Guild has always been
leftist more than liberal, and often venal instead of principled. And given the history of
the WGA, it should be no surprise to Julio
Vera or anyone else that the organization
should cooperate in a project like this one,
involving quotas on the one hand and a caste
system on the other.
A short look backward shows that a number of the
Guild's founders were orthodox Stalinists who remained
faithful to the various schemes of the Great Helmsman,
including even the 1939-1941 Nazi-Soviet pact During the
Pact, in fact, true-believing screenwriter Dalton Trumbo
wrote a novel called The Remarkable Andrew, in which
General Andrew Jackson appears from the dead to argue
against aid to Britain in its fight against Germany. It was
also about this time that John Howard Lawson, also known
as the "Hollywood commissar" and a prime mover of the
Guild, was described by fellow communist Paul Jarrico as
"an infantile leftist, a sectarian sonofabitch."
Lawson's faction dominated during the early years
of the Guild, and maintained a decorous silence while
Stalin kangaroo-courted many of their fellow writers in
the Soviet Union into the gulag. This faction set a precedent for the current emphasis on quotas by establishing an
informal and covert affirmative action program during the
30s and 40s under which Party members wound up
writing many World War II movies, after the Party line
conveniently reverted to anti-fascism with the invasion of
the motherland. Long before they were subjected to the
inquisition staged by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the Party members in the Guild were
blacklisting, slandering, and obstructing writers, even
liberals and leftists, who did not share their loyalties. Such
vicious treatment perhaps explains why so many were
willing to testify against the communist writers when
HUAC finally did come to town.
Lawson, Trumbo, and others who later gained notoriety as the "Hollywood Ten" are even today considered to be
misunderstood idealists, not the shameless Party hacks they
actually were, and are regarded with considerable subpoena
envy, to use Norman Mailer's phrase. In addition to a strong
leftist profile left over from the 30s and 40s, the Guild also
maintains a healthy self-image. "As a union we probably
have the highest I.Q. in all of labor," said Ted Flicker in his
1986 campaign statement while running for Guild office,
without citing anything on the screen that might confirm
such superior intellect "WE'RE AN INDISPENSABLE
MONOPOLY," said fellow candidate Arthur Sellers (the
upper case is his), "a small group who're the architects of a
product in demand the world over." The key words here are
"monopoly" and "small group," words that give us clues as
to the dialectic that rules the Writers Guild of America.
In addition to their dramatic craft, screenwriters are
businesspersons with a product to sell. Many are writerproducers, who work both sides of the labor-management
line. Those who sign the six-figure deals we read about are
therefore also members of a union which helps the wealthy
play the role of proletarians without power. It also helps them
ignore the chief reality of their chic working-class enterprise:
Only half of the 7,500 members of WGA West are working
at any given time. Jay Leno's 1988 quip should have hit
home harder man it did: "Now that the strike is settled, only
85 percent of the Writers Guild will be unemployed." While
professing solidarity, scribes look for every advantage over
their fellow sisters and brothers in the union. Given such an
atmosphere, it is not overly cynical to presume that the
writer Delle Chatman, an affirmative action supporter, called
Chinea-Varela and asked for her contact at the magazine. It
turned out that Chatman had written a response, and, says
Chinea-Varela, "thought she could demand that it be published." Newsweek ran Chinea-Varela's piece in late 1988.
the Journal reprinted it in June 1989 but added a response
from Chatman called "Some Doors Must be Pried Open."
"Affirmative action [Chatman wrote] is the last tool
many minority writers have with which to exercise their
creative freedom of speech. When women, ethnic groups,
the disabled, and the mature are consistently locked out of
employment in television and film* they are also being
denied access to an ever-widening audience. And these two
powerful media remain the mouthpiece of white males, who
shape and steer the imagination of a country and an entire
planet with the celluloid and video stories they tell. Their
perspective on the state and direction of humanity is all
many of us will ever consider until a more diverse crew of
creators spin the tales, telling all sides of the varied truths
that comprise the human spirit."
Affirmative action, according to Chatman, "will have
to exist as long as humans continue the tragic practice of
discriminating against each other for differences that are
God-given. There will come a time when it is unnecessary...
but that happy day hasn't arrived yet. We aren't even close."
I
f this last point was somewhat like the ACLU urging a
suspension of habeus corpus until a crime wave subsides, Chatman's words nonetheless represented the
position of the Writers Guild, whose brass has no doubt that
it knows what is best for the protected classes suffering from
alleged white, anglo hegemony. In 1991, WGA executive
director Brian Walton pushed the affirmative action
process into the twilight zone of social
Hollywood may be
engineering when he suggested that some
Latinos act as unpaid consultants on projects
trying to recreate an
with Latino themes.
"It's not the Guild's business to recomentertainment version
mend," Chinea-Varela immediately protested.
of the old Negro
"This is not a job referral service." Indeed, a
Leagues with Latinos— WGA policy statement says: "The Guild represents writers primarily for the purpose of
separate and unequal collective bargaining in the motion picture,
television, and radio industries. We do not
treatment of one
obtain employment for writers, refer or recommend members for writing assignments,
particular ethnic
offer writing instruction or advice, nor do we
minority.
accept or handle material for submission to
production companies."
-Migdia Ghinea-Varela
Chinea-Varela and writer Julio Vera
complained about the consulting affair and found that
debate over the controversial process was suppressed.
Guild's current scheming Some derided these claims as paranoid. Yet a WGA
with CBS for firing practices^ involving affirmative action document outlining the "Latino Writers Committee
based on race and ethnicity is a matter of gaining economic Objectives" states that a planning session "will only deal
leverage as much as pushing principle.
with positive input and positive data that could possibly
benefit the group and/or individuals. Negative data or
In spite of her success, at a cost of what she describes as I 'bitching sessions' will be absolutely prohibited and
"ten brain-numbing years," Migdia Chinea-Varela was not tolerated." Committee officials also maintained strict
Agrowing uncomfortable with the tag of "Latina writer" controls on who could appear as a guest. This document
during the 1980s. "Am I being picked for my writing ability, stated further, "It is the Latino Writers Committee who
or to fulfill a quota?" she wondered. "Have I been selected represents the interest of Latino Writers in the Guild and in
because I'm a 'twofer'—a female Hispanic—or because the film and television industry." This came as a surprise to
they were enthralled with my deftly drawn characters and Chinea-Varela and others who assumed that the WGA, not
strong, original story line?" She found "something almost one of its committees, represented all writers, not just
insulting about these well-meaning affirmative action Latinos.
searches" and came to the conclusion that "there can be no
Vera complained to the Guild's Walton that he had
affirmative action without segregation," especially if "our been "prevented from expressing my dissent and from
names must be kept on separate lists."
engaging the [Latino Writers] Committee in a reasonable
Chinea-Varela, who resigned from the Latino Writers debate by the lack of parliamentary procedure." Walton
Committee in 1988, sent the article she wrote about her claimed to have investigated the incident but did not call
experiences in the industry, entitled "My Life as a Twofer," Vera or Chinea-Varela. Walton later replied that "debate in
to the WGAW Journal, the organ of the Guild, which refused and of itself, however, is unhelpful unless it's directed to the
to run it. The official editorial response was that the piece specific and appropriate work of the Committee." At the
"needed a lot of editing." But as anyone who has read the same time he was blowing off those who disagreed with him
Journal can testify, this would not be an impediment. The on the matter of assigning Latinos to monitor shows with
more likely reason was that what Chinea-Varela had to say Latino themes, he was hinting at an even more aggressive
challenged the Guild's position on affirmative action.
program for Latino writers.
Unabashed, Chinea-Varela sent the piece to Newsweek,
If many would find the solution proposed by Walton a
where it also encountered some strange obstacles. Hearing bit loony, it was not that they believed there was no problem
that the piece had been submitted to Newsweek, black screenwhen it came to the issue of Latinos in the entertainment
HETERODOXY
PAGE 5
industry. WGA screenwriter Fred
the membership. They simply presented it
One participant in this electronic discussion wonHaines, whose 1967 adaptation of
as a fait accompli.
dered how much CBS would be willing to pay Sicilian
Ulysses earned an Oscar nomination,
Doreen Braverman, chief counsel of writers and offered to bring his own olive oil. One writer
spoke for many when he said that the
the WGA, says that the deal has nothing to cited abuses in a similar program at Disney, where nonentertainmentindustry has ignored both
do with 38.F and is based on article 38.2, in Guild trainees rewrote the scripts of WGA members for half
Latino talent and the burgeoning Latino
which a company "agrees to explore with price with full Guild approval. Some who started out defendmarket. Dissident Chinea-Varela herself
the Guild's Equal Employment Officer ing the program had second thoughts and wound up attackonce wrote a script about a Cuban
new affirmative action programs to ing it. Talent, said one, should be the only protected class in
political prisoner, only to have a proincrease employment opportunities and the business, which had all along been the position of
ducer lamely reject it on the grounds
the availability of writing assignments for Migdia Chinea-Varela, Julio Vera, Fred Haines and others.
that American audiences would not acthe 'protected classes.' “Braverman
Richard Yniguez concedes that the opponents of the
cept a story about "illegal aliens."
argues that the Guild's ratification of the plan make some legitimate points, but insists that they are
"If the networks like CBS really
1988 Minimum Basic Agreement that ignoring the other side of the debate. The critics "are inciting
want to increase access for Latinos,
contained these provisions precluded the people against something that is positive," he says. He is not
there's nothing easier for them to do,"
need for further debate.
above playing the ethnicity card as the discussion intensi"Baloney," says screenwriter Fred fies: "You have disgruntled people who aren't working, who
says Fred Haines. "Just hire them. Put
Haines, who responded that what the happen to be anglo. I praise the union for caring what
out the word that you want scripts from
Latinos." But that is not what has come The Guild's Brian Walton membership had voted for was training happens to me, because I am not the majority." As for those
programs for aspiring writers, not a feath- Latino opponents of affirmative action, they have a false
about '
erbed for those who are already members of the Guild and are consciousness problem. "They consider themselves other
5 political preening endemic to Hollywood intersected trying to avoid competing for work on a equal basis. Latino than a protected class," sniffs Yniguez.
with public policy last June, when the U.S. . writer Julio Vera agrees. Including established WGA memCommission on Civil Rights set up shop at the posh bers was "where they crossed the line," he says. But the During the entire Cold War, the film and television
Sheraton Grand on South Figueroa and held hearings on the protected classes and Guild leadership loved the new plan, industry never openly championed the cause of a single
entertainment industry. The heads of major studios and TV which had Hollywood Feelgood written all over it.
Eastern Bloc artist or writer, though it did roll out the
networks showed up to hear the news (which they already "The program is a wonderful situation," said Richard welcome mat for Marxist dictator Daniel Ortega and his
knew) that minorities constituted a small portion of those Yniguez. "We're trying to do something good here, solve Sandalista entourage, with Ed Asner prominent among the
working in film and television. They might have responded the problem of invisibility. We are
hosts. Hollywood heavyweights such as
with a wise shake of the head about the human condition; finding a little breath of fresh air." The
Robert Redford and Jack Lemmon are
statistical disparities, rather than being abnormal, are a fea- Guild's Cheryl Rhoden told the
fans of Fidel Castro and attribute Cuba's
ture of life in America and everywhere else. Black Americans Hollywood Reporter that it was "to the
difficulties not to dictatorship and
hit home runs at twice the rate of Latino Americans. Germans credit of CBS and Jeff Sagansky, in
suffocating Marxist economics but to
hold a higher rate of representation among piano manufactur- particular, that they have brought a
the U.S. embargo. Dissident Cuban
singular
focus
to
the
problem
of
an
equiers than the Irish. Mohawk Indians are more highly reprewriters such as Heberto Padilla or the
table
hiring
of
writers
who
are
Latino."
sented than Cajurts among ironworkers in New York. And; as
poet Armando Valladares never received
far as the connection between equity and commerce is con- But established Latino writers such as Julio
official support from writers in the
cerned, the fact that blacks comprise about 75% of all Vera and Migdia Chinea-Varela, who had
American dream factories.
professional basketball players does not bother those who been holding their own in the industry for
Unlike Lemmon and Redford,
years, now found that prospective buyers
plunk down hard-earned money for tickets to the NBA.
Julio Vera and Migdea Chinea-Varela
of
their
material
lumped
them
in
with
the
Instead, Jeff Sagansky, president of CBS Entertainand their families have direct experiment, professed shock at the figures produced by these hear- bargain-basement trainees. Producers
ence of Cuban totalitarianism, which
ings, letting it be known he wanted to do something about "the were cool to accepting material or
they quite naturally oppose. Perhaps this
offering jobs unless it was on these cutproblem." In true industry style, the networking began.
is one reason why the official Latinos of the
Civil rights commissioner Charlie Rivera was a friend rate terms negotiated by the Guild.
Writers Guild have regarded them
In
another
telephone
conversation,
of Richard Yniguez, co-chair of the Latino Writers Commitaskance and left them dangling in the
Jeff
Sagansky
of
Guild
executive
Brian
Walton
told
tee, who showed up at the hearings. Afterwards he met with
wind during their dealings with WGA
CBS Entertainment
Sagansky who, says Yniguez, wanted to "put his mouth Chinea-Varela that "Latinos can work for
brass. But the two dissident Cubans
where his money was." Sagansky and CBS programming half." To some, it was strange for a union
believe their own Latino credentials are more solid that those
director Charles Segars met with the Guild's Brian Walton, with a radical posture to be involved in what amounted to of some members of the Latino Writers Committee, which
institutional scabbing.
who produced a deal.
is monitoring the CBS program.
Defenders of the plan explain that it is based on article
The WGA's zeal for affirmative action, it should be
'or
was
it
simply
Latino
writers
who
had
38.F in the Guild's 1988 Minimum Basic Agreement (MBA).
noted, includes no mechanism for verification. By the Guild's
achieved success by their own hard efforts and standards, you are what you say you are. WGA spokesThis provides for a "Writers Training Program," which aims
solid talents who were annoyed by the Guild's woman Cheryl Rhoden is on the record as saying that, in the
at "enhancing the training opportunities of aspiring writers"
social-artistic engineering arrangements with Guild, ethnicity is "self-determined." In 1989-90, Oliver
who are women, ethnic minorities, physically handicapped
CBS. Fred Haines and others complained that the "phony Stone listed himself as an "American Indian" and "Asian."
and "writers in the protected age group," that is, over 40.
To join the WGA, however, one must complete a certain training program" would devalue all writers. "CBS can That year no fewer than six WGA members claimed to be
amount of work in the industry. Thus, technically speaking, no say, 'we've filled our quota for peons,'" says Haines. "It's Eskimos, an increase of 50 percent from 1988. One of these
WGA member is an "aspiring writer," and this provision was disgraceful that the Guild would set up a two-tiered wage would-be igloo dwellers turned out to be Jewish comedy
clearly for non-WGA members, as the article itself explains system, even more so one that is based on ethnicity." writer Rowby Goren, who says he made the claim in a
when it says mat companies "may employ as a trainee on a term Haines told the Hollywood Reporter that "over the past 20 moment of whimsy. "I've always liked Eskimos," said
basis an individual who has not previously sold any literary years, one of the most effective union-busting tools has Goren. "I wrote down Eskimos [on the ethnicity questionmaterial under, or been employed pursuant to, this MBA or been the two-tier system, under which...management naire]." When the story broke, none of the other WGA
any of its predecessor MBAs."
gets concessions under the guise of apprenticeship pro- Eskimos wanted to be interviewed.
If the Guild was altering its rules to get into
To gain protected status in the WGA is not difficult,
grams, or whatever, which allow them
the apprenticeship business, that would
to pay new workers less money and says Chinea-Varela: "All you have to do is be willing to
have been one tiling. But one of the first
fewer benefits. Not only does manage- work for half. You can call yourself Latino." Adds Fred
writers to take advantage of the program
ment save money by paying some union Haines, "You are only a protected class when you want to
hardly fit the description of apprentice. The
members less, but they divide the union accept the notion of your own inferiority."
credits of Julie Friedgen, a member of the
Unwilling to do that, Chinea-Varela filed a complaint
against itself."
Latino Writer's Committee, include 21
In the weeks following the deci- with the National Labor Relations Board and Labor SecreJump Street, Crazy Like a Fox, In the Heat
tary
Robert
Reich. Her case is being handled by the Indision about Latino writers, there was a
of the Night, Magnum P.I. and other
war of words on the electronic bulletin vidual Rights Foundation, a California organization active
shows. It was a record that other Guild
boards visited by Guild members. One in First Amendment and equity issues in academia and the
members would envy and one which
defender of the plan explained that it entertainment industry. To implement its affirmative-action
indicated that Fiedgen was hardly an opprovided access to underrepresented plan, Chinea-Varela wrote, the Guild was violating its own
pressed minority shut out of the industry.
people who didn't get born into royal rules and agreements and failing to represent all of its
After the CBS deal was completed, howHollywood families. If the program members equally. "The Writers Guild has gradually turned
ever, both Friedgen and Latino Writers
bothered anyone, they should decline to into a police state," she says, "which beats up those Latino
Committee Co-Chair Yniguezclaimed that
participate, a "love it or leave it" ap- members who will not subscribe to their imposed caste
system, whether in the name of access programs or affirmathe program's true purpose was to train
proach.
established Latino writers to be "showtive action or whatever they choose to call it."
Writer Julio Vera
Others, with an eye on Guild rules
The NLRB has dismissed Chinea-Varela's complaint.
runners"
and
producers.
This
that otherwise levy stiff fines on members for working below
interpretation came a surprise to many in the Guild, who scale, sought to soft-pedal the job description by claiming The rejection has surely encouraged the WGA's protected
found no such language in 38.F. The rates of pay also proved that the trainees are not doing any actual writing but only classes, who are now planning to export the plan from CBS
of interest. Provision 38.F called for a maximum weekly pay observing the way Latino reality was created on the screen. to other networks and studios in a quest to ensure that, based
of $478, which CBS upped to $1,200—which was still
on their ethnicity, some writers continue to be more equal
If that were the case, however, Fred Haines and others
than others.
only about half the union's going rate. The WGA
wondered why CBS didn't strike a deal with "the observers'
executives did not subject the deal to any debate or a vote of
guild."
N
PAGE 6
APRIL 1994
BODIES OF EVIDENCE continued from page 1
sions. Whoever called me knew what I'd just sent to The
New Republic. There are only three of us who know what
was in that transmission." Including the mystery caller?
"That makes four," Davis says. These events have
caught him by surprise: "I used to laugh at things like
this—until I ended up on the goddamn floor."
As for the President's home state, Davis says: "It
is fairly easy for anyone who visits Arkansas to realize
that they are not exactly any longer in the United States
but have entered a kind of intercontinental Third World
police state."
D
avis's experiences in Arkansas might be dismissed if they didn't seem to be part of an
alarming, largely unexplored pattern of violence and intimidation which apparently has
ensnared individuals associated with the Clintons, their
former business partners, and reporters covering these
matters. While this network is for the most part an
informal one, elements of the official world are also
involved. The police, in fact, are exactly whom Little
Rock attorney Gary Johnson blames for the major
injuries he received just three weeks before Bill Clinton was nominated at the 1992 Democratic Convention. In a video tape entitled "Bill Clinton's Circle of
Power" (distributed by Citizens for Honest Government in Winchester, California: 800/633-0869),
Johnson says that he captured then-Gov. Clinton on
tape entering the apartment of his neighbor at Little
Rock's Quapaw Towers. It was Gennifer Flowers, the
woman who nearly torpedoed Clinton's White House
bid when she told reporters during the 1992 primaries
that she and Clinton had maintained a longtime extramarital relationship.
Johnson says he installed a video camera as part of
his home-security system and thus caught Clinton on
tape. During a social evening at Little Rock's Flaming
Arrow Club, he mentioned what his camera had cap-;/
tured. Not long afterwards, on June 26,1992, Johnson
was attacked by what he recalls as a group of three men
who hit him as they entered his house demanding the
tape. "They looked like state troopers," he remembers,
observing that they were husky and had cropped hair,
common features among the state police. Johnson was
beaten unconscious; his arm was smashed and his head
was struck. In "Circle of Power," Johnson lifts his shirt
to reveal a long scar stretching from his sternum to his
waistline. It marks the incision through which surgeons
repaired his perforated bladder and removed his raptured spleen.
Johnson's theory about the state police was provided with a context last fall when The American
Spectator's David Brock returned to Washington after
his first interviews with a group of Arkansas state
troopers who claimed they had arranged trysts for
Clinton when he was .governor. According to the
Spectator's Managing Editor Wladyslaw Pleszczynski,
he explains. The morning of September 10, the offices only the media computer."
were broken into again through the same wall, which had
Adding to the puzzle, Ian Shapolsky, publisher of
been repaired in the interim. On September 22, there was Compromised, says that on the weekends of April 2-3
a break-in at a studio apartment the Spectator maintains and 9-10, the locks to SPI's street-level warehouse and
on the upper east side of Manhattan.
shipping facility were pried off and broken. "I would
'These are the first break-ins in our 27 year say there was several hundred thousand dollars worth of
history," Pleszczynski says. "We didn't neces- inventory in there and nothing was touched," Shapolsky
sarily connect it with David's research, but it made you says. "We have $50 color photo books and copies of
wonder."
The American Spectator is
not the only
or gani z at i o n
close to the
Whitewater story
that has suffered
a break-in in
Manhattan.
On
March 14, John
Bell, publicity
director for SPI
Books in New
York City, came
— Gary Parks, U.S. Navy
to work to follow
up on the media
contact he had
developed to promote a new book called Compromised Compromised in there. A thief could sell those books on
by Terry Reed and John Cummings. Among other the street, yet nothing was taken." He adds that SPI
things, the authors claim that in the 1980s, then-Gov. Books has been in the same location on Manhattan's
Clinton was involved in the CIA's mission to supply the West 22nd Street "since 1988 and never had a problem."
Nicaraguan Contras. As part of that effort, "more than
$9 million a week in cash was secretly air dropped into
here are other unexplained incidents surroundArkansas, which became the CIA's domestic 'banana
the Whitewater scandal, enough to provide
republic' These clandestine funds were laundered for
material for several shows of The X-Files. At
the Agency and then used for the development of Arkan11:56 p.m. on January 24, for instance, a fire
sas industry."
was reported on the 14th floor of Little
As Bell clicked on his computer that morning, Rock's Worthen Tower, headquarters of the Worthen
"there was something wrong," he says. . "I quickly Bank, that loaned $3.5 million to the Clinton presidenrealized that my computer was a shell. It was completely tial campaign and held on deposit $55 million in federal
empty, void, nada"
matching funds for the fall 1992 race against George
Bell's computer hard drive had been drained. Ac- Bush. While no one was hurt, the blaze partially decording to Julian Serer, SPI's director of computer stroyed the offices of Peat Marwick, a major accounting
services, the hard drive's DOS partition had been de- firm that in 1986 redid the Frost Company's audit of the
leted, then the disc was reformatted. He used diagnostic Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan. Madison was owned
software to look for computer viruses, which could have by James McDougal, the Clintons' business partner in
caused this problem, but found no trace of any. Serer, the failed Whitewater Development Corp.
who is working on his second master's degree in meThe fire "is suspicious only in people's minds,"
chanical engineering, says he has never seen a hard disc insists Peat Marwick spokeswoman Barbara Kraft, who
behave this way. "It was not a crash," he says. "This was adds that no documents were destroyed. Still, the timing
simply a missing partition. The disc was brought back of the blaze seems significant, coming as it did just four
to its initial state as if it were brand new." Serer days after the appointment of Whitewater Special Pros
concludes: "It looked like sabotage, to tell the truth." ecutor Robert Fiske and within three days of the Rose
The timing of this incident is significant. "The Law Finn's reported shredding of documents that be
book was hitting that week," John Bell says. 'Hlie media longed to former White House Deputy Counsel Vincent
mailing had been done for the most part, and when Foster.
people called back I had no records to refer to, so
everything was a mystery. Because there was such a
here has been death as well as disaster. The
flood of calls, I was working on a paper system and
"suicide" of Vincent Foster (please see
that became a l o gi st i c al
sidebar) occurred the very day the FBI was
nightmare." Bell says the
granted a warrant to search the offices of Clinstrange computer trouble, ton associate David Hale, a former judge who claims
which he believes resulted from that when he was governor, Clinton pressured his coma
break-in
over
the pany, Capital Management, into making a $300,000
p r e v i o u s wee k e n d, Small Business Administration-backed loan to
"completely eradicated...
Whitewater partner Susan McDougal, ex-wife of James
years of updated media lists. McDougal, central figure in the scandal. $110,000 of
Thousands and thousands of that money ended up in Whitewater's account and was
names. These were extensive used to buy 810 acres of land from the International
lists that we had prepared for Paper company.
this book going back for a
And on his way home from a Mexican restaurant
year."
last September 26, Luther "Jerry" Parks was killed at
"We do a lot of close range by at least 10 bullets from a nine millimeter
controversial books," Bell semiautomatic pistol. Parks's company, American Concontinues.
"We
alienate tract Services Inc., had provided security guards to
everyone
from
Islamic Clinton's presidential campaign and transition headfundamentalists to the Mafia. quarters in Little Rock.
For maximum damage they would have taken out the
"I believe it was premeditated," Parks's widow,
production computer where a lot of our future books Jane, told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette."! believe
are formatted. But nothing else was touched,
someone has been watching us." In an exclusive interview in the March 20 London Sunday Telegraph, Parks's
son goes further: "I believe they had my father killed to
save Bill Clinton's political career." Gary Parks, a 23year-old former Navy submarine navigator, says, "My
"It is fairly easy for anyone
who visits Arkansas to realize
that they have entered a
kind of intercontinental Third
World police state."
- L.J. Davis
last September 3, the magazine's Arlington, Virginia
offices were broken into. "All the desk drawers were left
ajar and not closed completely," Pleszczynski says. "It
appeared that someone had been checking the drawers."
A boom box and Sony Walkman were taken, but otherwise the office "actually was left in pristine condition."
Whoever entered "got in through an unused part of the
top floor, then cut a hole in a thin wall into the mailroom,"
T
"My dad was investigating
Clinton's infidelities for about
six years...I believe they had my
father killed to save Bill Clinton's
political career."
T
T
HETERODOXY
dad was working on Clinton's infidelities for about six
years, starting in the campaign around 1983." He claims
further that his father's investigative work was compiled in a pair of photo- and name-filled files hidden in
his dad's bedroom,
Jane Parks says that shortly before her husband's death, their home was broken into and
phone lines were severed, knocking out a security
system. When she and her son looked for the Clinton
files, they "were just missing," she says. "I suppose they
must have been stolen."
Are Mrs. Parks and her son dreaming all this up? At
least one lawman buys their story., "If they say that some
files were missing, then I can tell you those files were
missing," Sgt. Clyde Steelman, the Little Rock Police
Department detective investigating Parks's murder, told
the Telegraph. "The Parks family aren't lying to you."
PAGE 7
Li addition, on March 1, while flying home alone
in his private plane, Herschel Friday crashed and died in
Little Rock. Friday, an experienced pilot, was head of
Friday, Eldredge & Clark, Arkansas's largest law firm,
and a member of Clinton's presidential campaign finance committee, according to Judy Jones, the firm's
office administrator.
Friday was landing on his private airfield in a
drizzle at dusk, with both his plane's and the landing
strip's lights illuminated. His son was guiding him
towards the ground by radio.
"Something happened that got him disoriented and
he dropped out of sight," his widow, Beth, says. "The
landing lights in the rain might have caused him to lose
perspective." Mrs. Friday still finds this all a bit curious.
"He had landed here so many times," she said. "He was
a very excellent pilot."
A
t about the same time, Ambrose EvansPritchard, Washington, D.C., correspondent
for the London Sunday Telegraph planned to
meet an anonymous Arkansas dentist who,
he says, was going to share "some
knowledge of a sensitive nature" about personalities
and transactions that had taken place there. EvansPritchard says he got a call on March 4 from a contact
who had arranged the meeting telling him not to bother
to come to Arkansas. "They got him last night," in a
plane crash in Wichita Falls, Texas, Evans-Pritchard
recalls being told about his erstwhile source.
Early that morning, David Keating, a reporter
with KFDX-TV in Wichita Falls, covered a crash that
killed a pilot and three passengers including a Royal,
Arkansas dentist named Ronald Rogers. A twin-engine
Cessna headed from Dallas to the Denver area reported
PAGE 8
APRIL1994
electrical trouble at about 10:30 p.m. on March 3.
According to an FAA report Keating quoted, the plane
vanished from radar near Lawton, Oklahoma, after the
pilot signaled that he planned to refuel there. Oddly, the
northbound plane crashed with a full tank of gas about
45 miles south of Lawton—just three miles east of the
Shepard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls.
Bad weather was not a factor that evening. "It was
clear as could be," Keating remembers. "I saw the stars
myself at 3:00 in the morning." Nonetheless, the plane
seemed to have been lost. Keating says a map and
magnifying glass were found in the front of the plane.
"It's kind of strange. I don't know why they'd be this far
off course." The front of the plane was totally demolished
and the back was intact, according to Keating, who adds,
"The whole thing is weird."
As a result of all these ominous occurrences, EvansPritchard says he has been careful to remain a moving
target on his three journalistic visits to Arkansas. Among
other things, he changes hotels daily. "I check out and
don't tell anyone where I'm going," he says. He can only
remember one other part of the world where he took such
precautions: "I used to do this in Guatemala and El
Salvador when I was working on delicate stories and
dangerous sorts of things."
"It's a bit difficult for people to understand that
this is going on within the borders of the U.S. You!ve
got quite a climate of fear," says the British journalist.
"There's a serious shutting-up operation underway."
DEROY MURDOCK is a New York writer and
president of Loud & Clear Communications, a marketing and media consultancy.
HETERODOXY
PAGE 9
TAILHOOK
THE LAST WORD
LT. BETH WARNICK, one of the key accusers
in the Tailhook witch hunt.
The scandal over the Tailhook conven- tion in a
Las Vegas hotel, which caused the biggest shakeup in the Navy’s history and left a trail of ruined
careers, is now part of U.S. military and cultural
history. The government accused 140 Navy and
Marine pilots of assaulting 83 women, but was
unable to convict a single one of them in a court of
law, a confirmation of the fact that this was a
witch hunt rather than a legal proceeding.
Heterodoxy reported on the scandalous nature of
this inquisition, but the American media as a
whole, intimidated by radical feminism, could
not bring itself to pursue the story. The press
found apolitically correct version of the outcome:
The Tailhook prosecutions failed because the
Navy was not really intent on convicting the
accused. This was the theme pursued, for
instance, by the erstwhile drama critic of The New
York Times, Frank Rich, who wrote this about
Tailhook: "The scandal has been swept under the
Navy's rug. 140 marauding Navy and Marine
pilots, 83 assaulted women, 0 Courts-Martial."
Consider how Rich makes the alleged 83 assaults
into a "fact," when it was actually nothing more
than a claim which the government failed to prove
in a court of law. Anyone who has read the
government's own report on Tailhook knows that
ten of these 83 women denied that they had been
assaulted when asked by the government investigators. A Times editorial claimed that no one was
convicted because scores of commissioned officers lied about what they had witnessed. In point of
fact, no one was convicted because the women
who accused the officers were proven to be liars
themselves in a court of law.
Commander Robert B. Rae, an attorney who repre
sented some of the Tailhook defendants and has a long
experience with Naval justice, knows as much as anyone
about the tainted nature of the Tailhook investigation and
the inner workings of the trial, which failed to find anything
resembling the holocaust of sexual harassment that radical
feminists and their agentsin the media claimed Tailhook
represented. Heterodoxy's David Horowitz interviewed
Rae on March 4,1994, A partial transcript of that interview
follows:
Q: How did you get involved in the Tailhook
affair?
A: Actually, in a couple of the cases I was referred
directly to the individuals by people who knew my
reputation.
Q: What happened at the outset of this situation?
Refresh our memories.
A: We first came on board with the investigation
shortly after everything was just commenced with Admiral Reeden, who is the Service Force Commander
and the consolidated disposition authority, kind of the
head honeho that the CNO and the Secretary of the
Navy had appointed to do all the Navy cases. And from
the outset, it was just a very difficult task to get any
information from the government other than "these
people are all guilty, we're gonna hang 'em all high and
you're not gettin' any evidence."
Q: We never heard anything in the press about the
kind of extralegal methods and intimidations that went
on in the Navy's investigations and prosecutions of these
men.
A: Which is one of the faults of the media early on.
They took everything the Navy presented to them as
gospel, including the Tailhook report and the facts that they
supposedly had, even though many times they were indeed
not facts, but outright falsehoods.
Q: Give an example of some of the methods of the
investigators.
A: Primarily, there was a special agent, Peter Black,
who was one of the head honchos in this whole thing, who
on the stand several times under cross examination admitted to certain policies that they had, such as not looking into
any extramarital affairs that may have been launched there
at Tailhook.
Q: In other words, some of the women had had
extramarital affairs and therefore had an ulterior interest
in lying and saying they were abused once their sexual play
came out, to protect themselves from their fiancees and
husbands?
A:Sure. But it also played
into the fact that they were trying to
prosecute males for certain conduct, whereas when there was direct
evidence regarding women who had
done the same thing, this was
ignored as a matter of policy. And in
particular with Paula Coughlin
[the most prominent of the Tailhook
women] there was a policy that no
agent would receive any information
about her. She was right, she was
true, she did everything good; and
Admiral Frank Kelso [then Chief of
Naval Operations] and everybody
else was protecting her.
Q: In other words, it's the
exact opposite of wKaTthe media
has said. That is, the top Navy brass
was protecting Coughlin and the
accusers and was out to convict the
accused at all costs.
A:There is direct testimony
that shows Barbara Pope [then Assistant Secretary of the Navy] and
many others wanted to hang people
high.
Q:. It was said that she told
Dick Cheney [then Secretary of
Defense] that if heads didn't roll she was going to resign in
the midst of the '92 campaign.
A: It was even more than that. It was basically if
you don't do this now, if you don't fire them all, I'm
going to quit. You know, they don't care about due
process; they
just want to fire them all.
Q: Let's go back to this extramarital affair business.
You had a client, Lieutenant Cowden, who was accused of
participating in a gang rape of a Naval officer named
Elizabeth Warnick.
A: He had been accused of very heinous crimes by
Miss Warnick, as well as another client of mine. It turned
out that the Department of Defense agents in charge of the
investigation, who ended up testifying on the stand, had to
admit that she had lied to them under oath in order to cover
up her own participation in events at Tailhook.
Q: Was she having an affair with Cowden? Al
Well, that remains to be seen. She certainly had
consensual sex with him and other people out there, and she
was certainly interested in protecting her position on that.
But the charges she leveled against Lieutenant Cowden and
some of the others were very, very heinous sex crimes.
Gt. Gang rape.
A:Yeah, right. Those kind of things are not taken
lightly by anybody, military or not.
Q: So Elizabeth Warnick admitted on the witness
stand that she had, in fact, perjured herself. That she had
not been gang raped. That she had been having sex with
Cowden and had lied because she was engaged and she
wanted to protect her engagement.
A: That is absolutely true, and was. It is one of the
most ironic parts of Tailhook, too, because Admiral Kelso
knew about a very important clause in the Navy's sexual
harassment instructions that says if someone falsely accuses someone else of a sexual crime or sexual harassment,
those people will be brought to justice. She never was, of
course.
Q: So there was an outright attempt to defame the
accused aviators.
A: That's right. The defamation, for many of
them, began when their names were originally released.
For instance, Commander Greg Tritt, who is about one of
the straightest shooters you're ever gonna see, was
always portrayed as being in the third floor passageway
where the gauntlet was taking
place. And he was never there.
He was never, in fact, charged
with being there. There was
never, ever any evidence at all
that he was there. But the media
accepted the government's word
that he was a ring leader.
Q: Some people say that
Tailhook is one of the worst witch
hunts in American history, far
worse than the McCarthy witch
hunt in the number of careers
and the number of lives that
were blighted forever, for no
particular reason.
A: We used to have warriors who ran the Navy and who
ran the Armed Forces. Now everybody who's in a position of
power there is a politician, and
they only care about themselves.
They don't care about the chain of
command and those who work
for them. The biggest problem
we ran into here was the
arrogance, all the way up
through the chain of command,
saying we're going to hang these commanders and
lieutenants but God forbid that we should have to take
any responsibility for these actions.
Reprints of this article are available: $1 each.
PAGE 10
RADICAL continued from page 1
lost; hosts of the defeated move through the halls like
shattered armies. Even PC victors betray an angry exhaustion
born of fighting for ideas that have already lost their resonance by the time victory occurs. Everywhere, one feels the
growing enervation of decadence.
It was not always like this.
30 years ago, when I began teaching at CSUS—at that
time called Sacramento State College—the college was
already convulsed by a power struggle stemming from its
recent conversion from a teacher-training college to a liberal
arts school. It was in that moment of pause before the 60s
turned radical and began to pour out hatred onto anything
American and democratic. There was a power struggle on
campus, one which was both political and academic, but it
was a hopeful time, not yet constricted by the smelly
orthodoxies of homegrown Marxism. Everything seemed to
revolve around the Young Turks' hope that a genuine
academic community could be formed. Yes, back then the
magic word was not "diversity" but "community."
We hoped to create a community where ideas would
flourish; where innovation would be tolerated, even encouraged. We were to be intellectually free and engaged. And
indeed, faculty wrote articles all the time in the student
newspapers or in countless alternative newspapers, so that
the line between students and faculty was blurred. Let me be
blunt. CSUS was still a college of the third or even the fourth
rank, but the students and the faculty were both engaged
with ideas and with each other. Dialogue was pervasive.
Three years after I arrived, the school setup an interdisciplinary College Honors Program, and I was made Assistant
Coordinator.
This was the 60s, a period of great investment in
higher education in California, and we were all—students
and faculty—filled with hope.
Today, not a single edifice of this world remains, only
the rubble. That heady dialogue, even its faint echoes, has
long since passed into silence. Today, only PC monologue
rules.
As a result, many of my liberal colleagues, especially
the middle aged, corroded by an incipient sense of their own
"bad faith," of their own cowardly complicity in the betrayal
of higher education, seek desperately to deny responsibility
for the collapsing standards, the corrupt educational practices, the warping of truth, the blatant ideological abuse of
students, the large number of "burnt-out cases" among their
colleagues. They blame inadequate funding, the power of
TV, the break up of the family, and, especially, capitalism
and its attendant pathologies—sexismy racism, consumerism, etc.—anything that exonerates them and demands of
them nothing.
APRIL 1994
B
ut it is not only the faculty who have changed;
so have the students. They are considerably
less innocent and therefore considerably less
hopeful than they once were; less intellectually disciplined yet more focused on grades;
more jaundiced and yet less critical; more utilitarian but
less pragmatic; more independent and yet less original;
weaker in fundamentals yet greater in ambition; resentful
of demands but insatiable in their need for approval. The
list of paradoxes goes on and on.
These students do what they must to survive, just as
students always have, only with a singularity of purpose
devoid of illusions and with a feeling of self-justification
that brooks no correction. Informed that they can't read
very well, an excessively high percentage bristle with
hostility. They often adopt a war footing. Frequently the
enemy is viewed as the demands made upon them—the
skills, the body of material to be covered, the professor's
expectations. Products of poor public schooling where the
cliches of the 60s have come home to roost, they have few
resources to call upon.
Those demands that can be fulfilled within the constraints imposed upon them by their background and their
situation—many must work long hours to afford even the
relatively inexpensive college where I teach—are viewed
as "reasonable"; those that cannot are resented as "unreasonable." To be sure, no task is deemed reasonable unless
it can be met within the unstated student guidelines in a
manner certain to receive a good grade.
It is this sense of entitlement, this low-level psychic
warfare against educational standards and the expectations of those professors who still have them—a struggle
the purpose of which is unconsciously to diminish expectations and erode faculty confidence in the reasonableness
of their requirements—that is so new in the academy and
so momentous in its significance.
In 1965, the first year I taught a course in Great
European Novels, I included ten novels in my reading list,
totaling 5,000 pages. I continued this syllabus throughout
the 60s. Did the students read everything? No, of course
not. They laughed at what they perceived to be impossible
expectations. But it was good-natured laughter. They
yielded to the inevitability of failed coverage, just as
almost all of us in graduate school did—with a spirit of
resignation, a sense of awe at the immensity of the task, and
with an anxious heart and a dogged perserverance. I do not
recall the difficulty of my courses or the "reasonableness"
of my requirements affecting my course evaluations. We
were all more carefree then, and, I think, more respectful
of our different functions—the teachers and the taught—
in the educational enterprise.
I now have reading lists of under 2,000 pages in my
upper-division courses; 3,000 became impossible three
years ago. But of greater significance is the fact that
students today have by and large a far deeper hostility
toward the
requirements.
And more impor-
tantly, theirperceived unreasonableness is no longer viewed
as a source of black humor. Stiff requirements are perceived
by some students as a threat to their vital life interests, which
is why I find the students today more fearful and yet more
disrespectful, and the faculty more fearful and thus obsequious in seeking to ingratiate themselves with the students,
than at any time in my 33 years of teaching.
The situation I have just described is, I suppose,
symptomatic of a larger educational crisis, a crisis as much
rooted in economic decline, demographic change, increased
pressure to receive a college degree, etc., as it is in the
devastating consequences of a generation of Marxist liberal
educational ideology. But this ideology and the corruption
of educational values that follows such ablatantly dishonest
attempt at indoctrination, when wed to the new postmodern
delegitimization of old institutions and American society in
general, has made such deep cynics of students that their
cynicism is almost imperceptible, visible only as the complex of symptoms I have described. It is, thus, for all the
liberal refusal to confront it, a loss of faith in education as
a soul journey; also, a loss of hope in its transforming
power; acrisis of the spirit; and an exhaustion of belief. All
these are the result of 30 years of exposure to an ideology
whose unstated aim is to erode belief in American institutions and American life.
Subjected to endless ideological assault, academia's
immune system is shot. It has become subject to a variety of
opportunistic disorders. And the politically correct are not
immune from attendant diseases, despite their conviction
that traditional society is sick and they are healthy. In fact,
I am persuaded that much of the militancy of the younger
politically correct faculty, much of their compulsion to
ignore inconvenient facts—indeed, to deny that facts (or
truth) objectively exist—and much of their intolerance and
brutal suppression of dissenting perspectives, in and out of
class, is nothing more than an elaborate defense mechanism
to stave off the threat of a confrontation with a complex,
intractable, and increasingly intolerable reality.
F
reud has argued that the ultimate measure of the
ego's health is a strong reality principle. If so,
then what we are witnessing in the narrow,
hermetic orthodoxies of PC are countless individuals who suffer from a beleaguered ego structure, and who are therefore compelled, in order to maintain
the ego's precarious organization, to withdraw from reality.
This need to suppress awareness, which itself is symptomatic of pathology, explains the politically correct's wild,
compensatory fascination with the postmodern ideology of
the omnipresent role of power in human affairs articulated
so vulgarly by Foucault and others.
No, we were far more innocent in the 60s, and even if
the age was filled with turbulence and pain, and even if its
excesses are part of the origins of today's malaise, it was at
its worst different from what we have today—the rhetoric
of challenge without force or conviction, supported only by
coercion and intimidation. And everywhere one picks up
the stench of exhausted ideas that even adherents no longer
believe in.
My second, third, and fourth years at
CSUS were marked by explosive tenure
battles. The first battle, in 1964,
broke out in the Education
Division and involved a
well-liked,
innovative
young faculty member who
had a large student follow
ing. In 1965, we had the first
of two English department
tenure battles. This one dealt
with an eccentric but sweet
old anarchist, who, because she
had but an M.A. degree,
taught only composi
tion and freshman lit
erature courses. She
had a tendency, like many
Of the goodhearted, to attract all
sorts of campus
strays, but she was
adored by her stu-
had a tendency, like
HETERODOXY
dents, and while she was wildly undisciplined in her
grading and teaching methods, she had a profound and
original understanding and an emotional reverence for
literature, as well as a magic power to generate in her
students a heartfelt love of reading and writing.
Taking a leaf from the spontaneous student demonstrations that had formed in support of the education
professor, I actively began to organize the students in
demonstrations for this woman. And in order to increase
the pressure on the tenured faculty and the administration,
I established an alternative newspaper run by student
activists, a paper called The Student that lasted until the end of
the Vietnam War. The department decision to deny her
tenure was overruled by the division.
The next year, 1966,1 myself was, without explanation, denied tenure, despite the fact I had just published a
book, written numerous articles, scholarly and otherwise,
was active on key campus committees and had been awarded
a Distinguished Professor Award, only one of four given to
CSUS that year.
This time, because of my close ties with student
activists and also with the liberal and radical faculty,
things exploded at all levels of the campus. And this time,
the news of the battle, and of the student petitions and
demonstrations, spilled over into the local newspapers
and TV stations.
An added irony occurred when I was selected in the
spring of 1967 to be the Faculty Convocation speaker, the
campus's highest honor and an event for which classes
were dismissed. I called my speech "The Underground
Man" and took as my texts Kafka's The Metamorphosis
and Dostdevsky's Notes from the Underground. The
student newspaper began its front-page review with this
passage: "We are losing sight of individuals and beginning
to gaze on labels; this is the inevitable result of bureaucratic
impersonality and a view of the world which turns people
into instruments and products instead of into rich and
meaningful individuals. People will not be turned into
instruments or products, only robots will; the rest will go
underground."
At the time I gave that speech, my target was the
entrenched "old guard" conservative who were obsessed
with the symbols of status and respectability instead of the
substance of excellence. It seemed inconceivable men that
this same speech would later seem a prophecy of an even
more ominous future menace from my leftist allies, and
that in one of the innumerable ironies that pervade the
intervening years, it would become an even more telling
indictment of them. Today, "going underground" has become for many students their only mode of survival in a
brutal and dishonest PC world.
At this time I had not yet learned to watch how people
treat others, only how they treated me. I had not yet learned
to realize that as people treat others, so will they treat you
when you become the "Other" (to use a chic current
formulation)—that is, the negativity to be overcome.
It seems clear to me now, in retrospect, that my
radical allies only seemedmom humane than the traditionalists I viewed as the opposition, because they were still
powerless. And I see now that their vaunted "compassion"
was only a means of seeking power—it contained the seeds
of the postmodern belief that power.rules. all relations and
in effect determines what is and is not moral. I should also
have seen, but did not, that already in their intolerance and
cruelty toward the old guard—whose offense, after all, was
simply.-that they had different beliefs and believed what
they said—they betrayed their real attitude toward difference, which is why the PC multicultural obsession with
tolerance and respect for diversity is such a grotesque fraud
and edifice of self deception.
another life. I do not even know if I would recognize that
young man.
I do know this. Something more than a decade later,
after I declared "war on the radicals" in a paid 2,000 word
advertisement in the student paper, The Hornet (it had to
be an ad because the paper would not accept it as an
article), less than a dozen faculty members out of more
than a thousand on campus would publicly acknowledge
me or engage in conversation with me, so
cowed by abusive radicalism had CSUS become.
This "declaration of war" had been coming
for a long time. But I had not seen it—not even
lurking in the shadows. In 19701 would not
have believed it could happen.
With the exception of the death of my
son, for whom I still grieve, nothing has matched
my slow, agonizing but inexorable break with
the left. At times during these years, as it became clear to me what was happening, I felt
disemboweled, as if the moral center had been
ripped out of me. I had bought so deeply into the
Manichaean polarities of the left and had so
internalized the perversity of its analyses (especially the obsessive oppressor-oppressed dichotomy), that for a long time I experienced the
movement away from leftism I was powerless to
stop as a fall—from idealism, from generosity
and goodness—rather than as an ascent out of
the cave of illusion where I had been a
prisoner, deluded by unacknowledged ambition and resentment I grieved at my loss—of
innocence, of faith and hope, of confidence and
belonging.
It would be nice to relate a Joycean epiphany
that defined my falling away, but I experienced no such
sudden burst of illumination. Instead, there was only an
endless series of small discoveries made and repeatedly
repressed, only with ever-increasing difficulty and each time
with a greater sense of dissatisfaction—with myself,
foremost, but also with the world around me. The more
desperately I clung to my failing belief, the more I was
compelled to attribute the failure to others and to increase
my anger at them. It was a movement that wbuld lead
me—as it has so many others involved with leftism—to
what the theoretical love of humanity hides:
misanthropy.
Looking back, I can see countless small signs of the
break that was to come—shock when in 1971, the radicalled Academic Senate voted to disband the College Honors
Program as "elitist"; horror that it would terminate the
publication and sale of faculty evaluations by the Associated Students.
But there were large signs as well that illusions were
yielding to a poisonous reality. For example, in 1968, when
I was faculty advisor on the Visiting Speakers Bureau, a
largely student-run affair, I remember thinking it would be
a good idea to bring a feminist speaker to campus. (It was
a year or two before the explosion of feminism in the
university). I believe there were nine people in the audience. Here things also took an ironic turn. A couple of
years later, in 1970, the first feminist consciousness-raising encounter group was held in the College Honors
Center. What transpired, far from being a dialogue, was a
hate-fest. Soon men were compelled to roll over and
expose their underbelly, although instead of winning for
them forbearance, as it does in the animal kingdom, this act
of submission brought only the requirement for more, and
more dramatic, self abasement.
Sometime later that year, there was an explosion in
the Educational Opportunity Program (EOP), a program
geared to give financial aid to disadvantaged students,
he tenure battles of the mid-Sixties effectively primarily but not exclusively minority. I had been on the
destroyed the old guard at CSUS, and within committee charged with forming the program a year or two
two years—certainly by 1969—the radicals before, and I was still active in the interview and screening
and liberals, aided by an endless supply of new
process. The newly formed Pan African Student Union
young faculty allies, swept to power. Having (PASU) was demonstrating to get rid of the head of the
by my own tenure battle become something of a cause EOP. He was Hispanic, and a good, caring, courageous,
celebre, I found myself with greatly expanded influence and competent man if I ever met one. The issue: unresponand an enlarged arena of action on campus.
siveness. And what was the nature of this unresponsiveIt would be tiresome to describe these years of power ness? He would not allow the interview process to be turned
and influence. And while it might help define the place into a political litmus test; he thought the EOP was for the
from which I began my journey of exodus from radicalism, disadvantaged, whether they were white, Hispanic, or
all this seems so long ago—the actions of another man in black. I know the interviews were being used as racial and
T
PAGE 11
political screening sessions for the selection of the "right"
(read "radical") minority students. I warned my Hispanic
colleague, who already knew that a confrontation was
brewing. But he refused to back down, not realizing how
corrupted the academic environment had already become.
A meeting in the Little Theatre on campus, which was
jammed with 500 faculty members, students, and
administrators—a meeting full of that supercharged en-
VICTOR COMERCHERO, 1971
ergy so characteristic of the era that combined powerintoxication, angry self-justification and the desire for
combat—turned into a kangaroo court. It was exactly as
Dostoevsky described it in The Brothers Karamazov after
the death of Father Zossima: Malice was unleashed and
even good men were silent. I remember trying to make a
statement in defense of my friend and colleague, but amidst
the rhetoric, the angry shouts, the intimidating exclamations, the administrative pusillanimity, it was impossible.
He was doomed. The next day the EOP Advisory Board
fired him in a unanimous vote.
After the pandemonium in the Little Theatre, I approached the leader of the Pan African Student Union—
whom I knew, as I did many of the black campus leaders
during the 60s—in order to explain my position. He was
surrounded by other PASU members, and when I approached, he shouted, "Get out of my face! If I catch you
in my face again, I'm going to kill you, motherfucker!" He
had to be physically restrained and was hustled away, quite
filled up with himself.
The withdrawal from integration and the beginning
of "cultural autonomy" (which in mis case meant excluding motivated, mature black and Hispanic men and women
from programs like EOP in favor of young political radicals
with poor academic prospects) had begun in earnest, much
to my sorrow. The easy, open and trusting relationship
between blacks and white radicals and liberals that existed
in the early days of the civil rights movement had been
replaced by a Black Power movement that assumed an
aggressive, rejectionist posture. The ppliticization and
balkanization of the campus in a radically new, illiberal,
and destructive way had begun. Taking a cue from Lenin's
perception of the defining power of language, radical
orthodoxy renamed itself dissent and used mat name to
suppress all real dissent as reaction. The silence that was to
sweep over the campus in the early 80s and is still with us
had begun.
A
fter my encounter with the leader of PASU, a
Marxist revolutionary colleague in social
work tried to console me. He liked and
respected me, though in his eyes I was only
a "radical liberal" and not a revolutionary. I
think he was genuinely sorry to have seen me hurt and
humiliated like that. I do not recall precisely what he said,
PAGE 12
but I distinctly remember its effect, which was that in a
revolution, injustice is inevitable, and mat I had to keep up
or be swept aside.
I would like to say that his attitude was unique, and,
I am sure it was somewhat uncommon. But in the ensuing
years, though many people on campus would be embarrassed to hear such views so nakedly expressed, it has
become the ruling idea of the politically correct, the implicit assumption that legitimizes their calculated abuse of
others. Drawn from Marxist dialectic, the roots of which
are lost or were never known to most PC adherents, added
to by other postmodern accretions like deconstruction,
poststructuralism, and feminism, a campus PC worldview
has grown up that legitimizes its excesses as part of the
inevitable "dialectic."
This confrontation in the Little Theatre, to be repeated in different guises over many issues in the next
couple of years, is my first memory of the discovery, which
was to grow, that to preserve my radical liberal credentials
and status, I would have to surrender my beliefs to the
"revolutionary tide," which even then was turning
Orwellian. To preserve my power to influence opinion, I
would have to surrender to the developing radical orthodoxy, thus making my imagined power a sham.
Throughout this period, the "orthodoxy sniffers" and
the "commitment checkers" were out in force, with their
jokes, their jibes, their nosy corrections. I remember being
asked in 1971 to give a speech attacking the U.S. incursion
into Cambodia. It was a predictable attack on U.S. policy in
Southeast Asia, but when I called the war a "mistake," the
look of scorn from some in the audience was palpable, as
was the exclamation, "He's just a fucking liberal!" A
couple of days later, over dinner, a woman in the history
department whom I was friendly with kindly explained to
me how I had erred. You see, the U.S. was not "mistaken"
in having intervened in Southeast Asia; it was a calculated,
predictable act of imperialism.
The anti-U.S. perspective, which I attacked in 1980
in a speech called "The Politics of Anti-Americanism,"
was just being born men. It is, of course, now a hallowed
part of the ruling liberal ideology.
Whether it was eliminating the draft, which I was
against, or a host of minor issues, there was always a
"politically correct" position, only that term had not yet
been coined. It was nothing so heavy-handed as being told
what to believe. That was unnecessary; one swiftly intuited
the party line and swung behind it in language, thought, and
deed.
APRIL 1994
trators. The old, unjust double standard was being replaced
by a new one that was even more outrageous.
The cry of the newly franchised—"It's our turn
now!"—rang triumphant throughout CSUS. The bullying
and thuggery that had done in my Hispanic colleague
during the early stages of the EOP became commonplace.
Unable to keep up with all this "progress," I withdrew into
my first hibernation in the mid-'70s.
Nothing more clearly revealed the Marxist penetration of liberalism than the knee-jerk anti-anti-communism
of this moment in our history, hi letters to the editor—by
faculty who had known me in the trenches years before—
I became overnight a "red-baiter," a "McCarthyite," a
"reactionary." Overnight I became a nonperson. Faculty I
had known for years as "comrades in arms" cut me dead or
were embarrassed to meet my eye. Everything was in the
body language, nothing in the actual utterance.
When I was limited by the editors of The Hornet to
he n I awakened, several years had one 250-word reply to a flurry of ad hominem attacks
passed. The awakening was really by against me for my advertisement, I set up another alternachance; campus political life had be- tive student newspaper called Dialogue. For the next two
come so oppressive, so nasty, that I years I attacked anything that moved—any student editoactually ceased to notice it. I went to my rial or faculty speech reported in The Hornetwas fair game,
classes and went home. I had stopped reading The Hornet any of the absurdities that now marked campus political life
and happened to pick up a copy quite casually one day in as a theatre of the absurd. I gave several speeches on
1980. The Soviets had just invaded Afghanistan, and the campus during the next two years on everything from "The
leftists on campus had used this example of classic 19th- Crisis of Authority" and "The Decline of Confidence" to
century imperialism not as an occasion for attacking the "The Politics of Anti-Americanism."
I knew I could not win. I knew there was no way to
Soviet Union, but as an occasion to put on a panel discusfundamentally alter the tenor of the discourse, no real way
sion attacking U.S. imperialism.
Now, I am very familiar with the liberal argument to get people to engage me in serious debate. So I set my
that this is fair because after all we are Americans and sights quite low—to end the radical monologue, to frighten
should be concerned with correcting our own imperfec- into decency the ideological thugs and bullies. My goal was
tions. I could even give credence to this spirit of self- simply to silence them. And given this limited goal, I think
criticism if, in the case of the left, it extended to one's own for a time I succeeded.
Nothing on the ground, of course, has really changed,
ideological affiliations. But it never does with them. On the
contrary, any criticism of the left is viewed as a moral lapse of course. The ideological abuse in class goes on, but it is
less blatant. The atmosphere did not sweeten, but it did not
and an act of treason.
Afghanistan was attacked; we were guilty. The grow more intimidating. Perhaps this is in part due to the
efforts of anti-PC groups and individuals, but in the main
illogic woke me up. Something in me snapped.
During my withdrawal, I had continued to be alive to I think it is due, despite all their self-righteous posturing
politics, as it were, subliminally. At some level of my and ideological bullying, to a growing crisis of confidence
being, I had been keeping score—that is, comparing my on the part of the tenured leftists.
For a long time, members of the left have been able
evolving beliefs and secret predictions about what was
happening with the evidence as it came pouring in. Whether to live by a double standard: judging American society by
mis growing body of evidence caused or merely paralleled its failures and their own ideology solely by its rhetorical
my withdrawal from the left is hard to say. I was certainly aspirations. But as the left has gained an increasing power
devastated by Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. The, over the institutions that shape American life, its adherents
unfolding events in Southeast Asia after the much-hoped- are no longer able to take refuge in the fiction of good
for U.S. defeat there—the oppression of Hanoi in Saigon, intentions and noble ideals. They, too, have to be judged
the desperation of the boat people, the Pol Pot genocide in by what they have wrought
For a long time after I lost my radical faith, I tried to
Cambodia—had vindicated the right and left me estranged
from my former allies such as Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden find an analogy for what was happening all around me in
academia.
For a time, I settled on a comparison drawn from
(who had made an appearance on the CSUS campus), now
part of a silent left who thought condemnation of the the works of Turgenev and Chekhov, in that all around me
Vietnamese would only give comfort to their enemies on I saw figures reminiscent of the well-meaning but superfluous Russian gentry, all of them ripe for annihilation by
the domestic scene.
The trial of the Gang of Four in China exposed the revolutionaries.
here were other warning signs of a rupture that reality behind Mao Tse-tung, whom I had revered in the
Today, I would still use a Russian analogy to underI ignored. But the first real fissure in my Sixties. While I and others in the professoriat had been stand academia, but I would place things in a different
relation with the left—I did not consider it so applauding the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revo- time—say, the Soviet Union in the last years of the Brezhnev
at the time, although some of my radical lution and repeating left-wing pieties that Mao had licked era, just before glasnost, when communism had exhausted
colleagues did—occurred in 1972 over the is- famine in China, 10 million to 30 million people were itself and paralysis and corruption were widespread, but
sue of affirmative action. I was against it, for, despite my starving to death, and enemies of the state had been chained the external forms held despite the rotting foundation. Oh,
infatuation with Marxism and Marxism-Leninism, I did in solitary confinement for ten years simply for listening to the jokes that emerged-from the Soviet Union then—grisly
not believe in collective guilt and therefore did not believe Mozart
bits of gallows humor bubbling up from the depths of the
in collective entitlement. In a long and withering attack
Add to these the betrayal of the Cuban Revolution, long-suffering Russian soul. That spirit of futility—and the
published in The Hornet, I excoriated my colleagues and the rise of crime and violence in our own society and the laughter-in-tears that accompanies it—permeates life in
argued that the sins of the fathers being visited on the sons failure of so many domestic programs supported by the left. the American university today.
might be God's way or even nature's way, but it was absurd It seemed to me that where the influence of the left was
It is not simply that academia is drenched in lies, as
to legislate it as social policy.
greatest, the performance results were poorest—all these the Soviet Union was under Brezhnev. It is that the lies
A war of words followed. I remember the response of facts made it harder and harder to engage in "those power- fertilize corruption and the venal seeking of power in a way
one faculty member because it was so typical of the ful deflections" by means of which, Freud tells us, we cope that bespeaks impending collapse.
inquisitorial spirit of the left in seeking to ferret out obscure with an intolerable reality.
Lies, and the calculated refusal to acknowledge them,
signs of racism and sexism. (Eurocentrism, patriarchy, and
But it was the panel discussion of U.S. imperialism whether by faculty or administrators, so pervades campus
other more sublime variations on these sins would not staged on my campus in 1980 that really brought home to life that we are suffering from an intellectual disorientation
emerge until later on.) My colleague objected to my use of me the awareness that liberals were no longer defining that threatens the nation. Our colleges and universities are
the term "white heat" in describing my anger; he called it liberalism, and had, in fact, lost control of their psyche and now prisoners of a perverse and solipsistic ideology, so
a racist phrase. If so, I scornfully suggested, then "red hot" were allowing liberalism to be defined by radicals. Or to much driven by partisan political agendas that criticism
must slur American Indians. I then proceeded to enlighten put it another way, in so many areas Marxist perspectives itself, by which we mean (in Matthew Arnold's phrase) the
him on how these metaphors referred to the changed color had so invaded the liberal climate of opinion that radicals disinterested attempt to see things as they really are, is now
of metal under high temperature.
no longer needed to be radical; they could now posture as lame or captive. The very institutions established to ensure
It got ugly, and I was seriously tainted by the contro- liberals and thus keep their respectability without surren- disinterested inquiry and the free play of the mind have
versy, although at the time I saw it only as an isolated battle dering any of their programmatic goals. Since power now been fatally infected with politics and orthodoxy. That we
lost. In retrospect, however, I see that this was the begin- resided with the radicals reborn as liberals, the old liberals do not acknowledge the virulence of the pathogen is proof
ning of a long retreat on my part, marked by skirmishes were forced to follow them abjectly or find themselves of the perniciousness of the disease.
over minority fiefdoms, and the growing bitterness of pejoratively redefined as reactionaries.
curricular politics. After one of my letters scathingly atI tried to write about this. When my essay was not VICTOR COMERCHERO is a professor of English at
tacking one of the feminist rhetorical excesses that soon accepted by the school paper, I had it printed as a paid California State University at Sacramento.
became part of daily campus life, a group of eight or ten advertisement In it I said nothing very extreme. Neverthewomen, dressed as a coven of witches, gathered in front of less, I said enough. I attacked communism and the notionone of my classes shouting insults. This action, though fashionable in the early '80s—of the moral equivalence of
witnessed by many, went officially unnoticed by adminis- the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
T
W
HETERODOXY
PAGE 13
The Stupid Club
by STUART GOLDMAN
fter Kurt Cobain, lead singer of the rock
group Nirvana, was found dead in Seattle f
at the age of 27, an apparent suicide
victim from a shotgun blast to the head,
his mother, Wendy O’Connor, told the
Associated Press: "Now he's gone and joined that
Stupid Club." She was referring, of course, to the
long list of entertainers who have died by their own
hand: Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley,
Jams Joplin, Marilyn Monroe, and so on.
friends into "spokesmen for a generation." And there's the
rub. When Cobain chose to check out last week, he was
dead meat for the hype machine—the media
jackasses who perpetuate the mythology that rock
music is dangerous and subversive; that it's anything
other than product.
If Kurt Cobain's death proved anything, it was
that the process by which the number of people enrolled in The Stupid Club skyrockets dramatically
when an icon dies. The following list, admittedly a
partial one, lays out some of the initiation rites for The
O'Connor's comment was a bitter one. Suicide makes Stupid Club in the period right after Cobain's suicide:
people bitter. It also makes them nervous. As novelist Joyce
Carol Oates put it, "The suicide does not play the game, does STUPID NIRVANA ACCOLADES FROM ASnot observe the rules. He leaves the party too soon, and SORTED ROCK CRITICS
In Nirvana, two million listeners have found a
leaves the other guests painfully uncomfortable."
Clearly, lots of people were very uncomfortable about voice for their doubts and fears. Nirvana doesn't offer
Cobain's exit. It is also true, however, that many used the any answers; these days it's an achievement just to
suicide as a soapbox for flatulent statements about the nature pose the questions. If they have any message for the
of rock and roll, of generational angst, and of the meaning of world, it's simply this: think for yourself. No wonder
life. The press had a field day with Cobain. The Los Angeles the music industry thinks they're subversive. —Suzi
Times ran lengthy pieces the entire week of his death. They Black, Nirvana (Omnibus Press).
This one is interesting because it contains many of the
even put his wife, Courtney Love (sort of a garage-band
version of Madonna), on the cover of the Sunday Calendar major cliches about rock music and life. That it poses no
section. The Los Angeles Weekly and. Newsweek plastered answers, only questions. (What questions?) And mat it is
the rock star on their covers. The Newsweek piece asked, subversive. Every bad boy rock group looking for a quick
PR fix has latched onto these calling cards. The notion that
"Why Do People Kill Themselves?"
After the orgy of press attention finally abated, it Nirvana or, for that matter, any other group that sells ten
became clear that membership in the Stupid Club was not million records is subversive is, of course, absurd.
restricted to the exclusive group that Cobain's mother had
STUPID ADJECTIVES COMMONLY USED TO DEoriginally referred to.
Of course, one expects a certain amount of stupidity to SCRIBE NIRVANA'S MUSIC
Bleak, uncompromising, eerie, challenging, thrilling,
come from people like rock critics, who are not necessarily
an intelligent life form. However, the sheer amount of menacing, terrifying, anguished, shocking... Oh yeah, let's
gibberish—the metaphor-mongering and homemade exis- not forget angst (even though it's not an adjective), a term
tential wails—that arose in the wake of Cobain's death cut virtually every rock stooge writing about Nirvana manages
across all age groups and cultural boundaries. It included to get into their copy.
Nirvana fans and foes alike, record company executives,
psychologists, sociologists, suicide counselors, disc jock- STUPID STATEMENTS BY AGING L.A. TIMES ROCK
eys and a bunch of people with word processors who call CRITIC ROBERT HILBURN
themselves journalists.
Cobain was a deeply sensitive man blessed with a
Just for the record, those who may detect a certain songwriting grace that has been compared to Bob Dylan
degree of, ah, cynicism in the following commentary might and John Lennon—in. "Kurt Cobain, Poet for the Dysfuncget the notion that I don't like Nirvana. This isn't so. Prior tional Age."
to writing this piece, I did a mini-Nirvana marathon of sorter
As for comparing Cobain with Dylan and Lennon, the
listened to all their CDs and read everything I could get my fact is that all three of these guys were capable of writing
hands on about them. What can I say? They're OK, you some pretty awful lyrics, but the other two had flashes of
know? Actually, they're pretty good. But "good," applied brilliance while Cobain did hot. (See Stupid Cobain Lyrics
to rock groups, is a pretty relative term. Part of what Nirvana below.) Also, Hilbum fails to mention that it was he himself
was all about (and Kurt Cobain himself copped to it) was who compared Cobain to Lerinori and Dylan, hot some
attitude rather than music—the right attitude and the right abstract authority he is citing. There is no law against selflook at the right time. This is what allowed them to sell ten plagiarism, but a writer ought to be wary of alluding to his
million
CDs
when
other
groups own unattributed opinion as if it is received truth.
that are just as "good" did not
Cobain felt as confused and troubled as any of the
Their luck—random
millions of young people who had bought the albums he
enough to be scary, random
made.
enough, in fact,
Maybe.
to make a person
He might be dismissed as a guy who was more lucky
feel a little ,
than talented, more indulgent than tormented. But he was
suicidal—
so much more...
made' Cobain
No comment.
and his
MORE STUPID JOURNALIST ANECDOTES
According to an observer, the journalists on the scene of
the Cobain suicide immediately divided themselves into
two camps. The checkbook journalists, led by representatives of A Current Affair, offered $1,500 (a pittance by
tabloid standards) for an exclusive to the electrician who
found Cobain's body—and immediately got whatever interviews there were to be had. The rest of the press, including
representatives from Rolling Stone, Spin and numerous
local papers, were relegated to grabbing any kid wearing a
flannel shirt and ripped jeans and grilling him for opinions
on the fallen leader of his generation. Unfortunately, many of
these fans were either too drugged out (or, it must be said, in
keeping with the theme of this piece, too stupid) to provide
very good interview material.
SOME FAIRLY STUPID REACTIONS TO COBAIN'S
SUICIDE BY NIRVANA FANS
I thought the way he went out was cool. —Tracey
Wilsher
/ think it's a publicity stunt. —Jeff Pierce
Kurt Cobain was God. —Mickey Holzman
STUPID FAN LETTERS WRITTEN TO NEWSPAPERS
What is it about being 27 years old, extremely talented
and having no reason to live? Scientists must have an
explanation. How can somebody so uniquely talented think
life is not worth living?—Karen Benton
The idea of turning to scientists slays me.
Hear me out, all you Nirvana fans who are buried in
confusion and grief and hear me out all you talented people
who don't think you can go on because your own passion
and trueness are in jeopardy. The biggest creative buzz of
your life comes from saving yourself and filling up with gas
for the next run. —Pamela Lawson
Serious New Age damage here.
Kurt's songs were vicarious primal scream therapy.
When you heard Cobain's pure-id, you could feel his pain,
which was also your pain...and the cathartic effect was
undeniable. —Tyler Caraway
Vicarious primal scream therapy? I thought Cobain was
a metaphor for the 90s, not the 70s.
STUPID (THOUGH POSSIBLY ACCURATE) STATEMENTS BY COBAIN'S WIFE, COURTNEY LOVE, TO
CROWD AT CANDLELIGHT VIGIL
Oh, he's such
an asshole. I want
you all to chant
asshole. (Note: the
crowd eagerly
complied.)
STUPID
POLICE
REPORT FILED BY
COBAIN'S MOTHER
Several days prior to
the discovery of his body,
Cobain': mother had filed a
missing persons report with
me Seattle police department.
The report described Cobain
as ''not dangerous, armed
with a shotgun, and may be
suicidal." —Los Angeles
Times.
PAGE 14
STUPIDITY EXHIBITED BY POLICE INVESTIGATORS
Three weeks prior to his death, police had been called
to Cobain's household by his wife, Courtney Love, who
said her husband was locked in a room with his guns and
threatening to kill himself. Police confiscated four guns, 25
rounds of ammo, and an undisclosed substance. Cobain,
however, was allowed to keep possession of his shotgun.
~L.A. Weekly
APRIL 1994
on the fruit, tender reds and blues...From "In Bloom" on
Nevermind.
STUPID PC LINER NOTES WRITTEN BY KURT UNFORTUNATE BIT OF PR ABOUT THE FUTURE
COBAIN
OF NIRVANA RELEASED SHORTLY BEFORE
If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of a COBAIN'S DEATH
different color, or women, please do us one favor. LEAVE
The beauty of Nirvana is that no one—least of all the
US THE FUCK ALONE!
band themselves—knows what will happen next.
STUPID ATTEMPTS TO WAX POETIC BY WRITERS
PORTION OF STUPID SUICIDE NOTE FOUND NEXT COVERING COBAIN'S SUICIDE
TO COBAIN'S BODY
Friday Night April 8...the evening of the day that Kurt
I thank all of you from the pit of my burning nauseous Cobain's body was found...the very first night of the rest of
stomach for your letters and concern during the last years. our lives. —Gina Arnold
They inhabit a strange pantheon of the suicidal, prowled
STUPID CROWD ANTICS AT CANDLELIGHT VIGIL by brilliant troubled ghosts. Some came to grief in the
nightfall of acclaimed careers, some in the withering highFOR COBAIN
And then, a beautiful thing happened—some 5,000 noon glare of public adulation. There are Hemingway and
people, mostly between the ages of 18 and 21, dressed in Plath, Monroe and Garland, Presley, Morrison, Hendrix
requisite plaid flannel over Nirvana T-shirts and carrying andJoplin.. .and now there is Kurt Cobain. —David Gelman,
flowers and candles, broke ranks. Instead of crowding Newsweek
These children, with their pagan hearts, had somehow
round the flag pavilion as they had been told to do, they ran
over to the fountain where the music was playing louder and spontaneously captured the very essence of Kurt's spirit: the
suddenly...they jumped in the water, danced and moshed big fuck you to life itself that had clearly raged through his
and flung one another around until city officials turned the very being. And then shirtless boys and wet haired girls,
fountain off. But the crowd refused to budge. Instead they oblivious to the weather, held their candles aloft and chanted,
sang Lithium and Polly and Rape Me and Milk It They Asshole, asshole, asshole. You could hear their gleeful
spelled out words like Kurt and fuck with candle wax on voices all the way up on the Space Needle. They sounded like
a prayer. —Gina Arnold
their bodies. —Gina Arnold reporting from Seattle
ROCK CRITIC AS MEDICAL EXAMINER
Though his condition has not been diagnosed, he had
begun to show signs of narcolepsy, an incomprehensible
illness which strikes its victims asleep as they stand. Working for a few weeks as a hotel janitor, Cobain spent more
hours asleep in the unoccupied rooms than he did in the
sweeping and cleaning that was supposed to be his vocation. —Suzi Black
Maybe he just liked to sleep on the job?
,;
suicide found only one difference: a loaded gun in the house.
—Jeanne Gordon, Newsweek
GLOOMY SEATTLE WEATHER AS METAPHOR FOR
DEATH
Ominously dark rain clouds were lowering themselves
over the far off Olympic Peninsula, an area often noted for
having the highest suicide rate in the United States. —Gina
Arnold.
A steady drizzle fell from chilly grey skies. —John
Balzar, Los Angeles Times
Lighten up, it's always raining in Seattle.
STUPID STATEMENTS FROM SYCOPHANTS AT
COBAIN WAKE
You guys are our family. Being here tonight is the best
possible way for celebrating Kurt's life and his true spirit. —
STUPID STATEMENTS FROM KURT COBAIN
We were afraid to play pop music because we were Jonathan Poneman of SubPop, Cobain's first label.
afraid people couldn't accept it.
If they could, you would have been playing "My Blue STUPID ATTEMPTS AT SOCIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION OF THE POPULARITY OF NIRVANA
Heaven," etc.?
Cobain put to music not simply the anti-establishment
We break things all the time. But that's just us compenrage of the 90s generation, many of them products of broken
sating for the frustration of being on the road.
homes who were denied the promise of a better life and who
Charles Kuralt didn't.
People just don't do things very often anymore. I'm like found themselves questioning the meaning of life itself...
kind of disturbed by it.
Nirvana, with their stringy hair, plaid work shirts and torn
Say WHAT!
jeans, appealed to a mass of young fans who were tired of
false idols like Madonna and Michael Jackson.
DESCRIPTION OF A STUPID NIRVANA PERFORMANCE
STUPID RHETORIC BY NIRVANA PEDDLERS
Nirvana ended a devastating performance as Cobain
I kind of feel it's in bad taste to encourage or glamorize
leaped into the crowd, Novoselic threw his bass at Grohl the fact that someone shot themselves.—Virgin Megastore
and then Cobain returned to the stage and leaped into the floor manager Jon Nelson, after refusing to play Nirvana
middle of Grohl's drumkit—Chris Charlesworth
records over the store's sound system following Cobain's
Yawn.
death. But Virgin did stock up on Nirvana CDs to meet the
expected rush following the suicide. "We ordered as many
copies as we could," Nelson admitted. "Hey, that's business."
LITTLE KNOWN FACT ABOUT NIRVANA
The group originally called themselves Fecal Matter.
POSSIBLE CONTROVERSY REGARDING CAUSE
OF SUICIDE
No one dies of depression. If snot a tenable entry on the
death certificate. —Dr. Edwin Shneidman, Emeritus Professor of Thanatology at UCLA
Clinically depressed people are at a 50% greater risk.
Unfortunately, doctors can't agree on whether suicidal
depression itself is a state of mind or a result of chemical
deficiency. —David Gelman, Newsweek.
PEOPLE SEEKING THE BOTTOM LINE
' All we really know about the subject is that we really
don't know. —-Dr; Irving Zane, Suicide Prevention Hotline
So don't do it! —Kurt Loder, Rolling Stone writertumed-MTV host
A BONE THROWN TO THE ANTI-GUN FOLKS
A study comparing adolescent suicide victims who
had no apparent mental disorders with kids who didn't
commit
STUPID RESPONSE BY CLINTON DURING HIS
TOWN HALL MEETING TO 17-YEAR-OLD'S QUESTION OF HOW HER GENERATION CAN ESCAPE
EMPTINESS EXEMPLIFIED BY COBAIN SUICIDE
If you can keep your eye on the future, then suicide
doesn't become an option, because you know there can
always be a better tomorrow.
AMUSING BUT NONETHELESS STUPID INTERNET
POSTINGS FOLLOWING COBAIN SUICIDE
Topic $997 Kurt Cobain is Dead April 10, 19:24
Internet alt. music, nirvana
<looloo> Did you ever see them live? They suck!
<blue> they don't suck
<looloo> and they can't write for shit
<blue> neither can you
<looloo> Maybe not but I don't go parading around on
mtv do I?
<blue> how do I know? maybe you do
<Orkmork> did you know the cops came to his house 3
weeks ago to try to stop him from killing himself
<blue> You're not serious?
<Orkmork> yep
<Bristol> does anybody have any idea where they'll
bury him?
<kcobain> this hole in my head is really hurting
<chowder> he created something no one else did or
could have
<hecubus> he had a lot of beard stubble and was a
greaseball
<cyan> he's a guy that died
<looloo> I still think axl is better
<chowder> you're an idiot!
<otis> mtv is going to show Nirvana unplugged every
day for the next 6 months
<looloo> yucko
<chowder> his music is valuable
<shiemp> he's a famous guy who died
<otis> he had bad hair
<rio> Kurt Cobain is really dead?
<chowder> Sadly it is true
<cyan2> NIRVANA IS OVER!!
<shiemp> cool
REFRESHING COMMENT BY A COBAIN PEER
PROVING THAT NOT EVERYONE IN GENERATION
X ASPIRES TO MEMBERSHIP IN THE STUPID CLUB
Being 24 years old, I am tired of Cobain being held up as
a spokesman for my generation. I am embarrassed to be
coupled with a selfish individual who could take his own life,
leaving behind his wife and his child. It is time for this
generation to reintroduce the concepts of virtue, family
commitment and life, and
end this selfish soulsearching that has been
attributed to us.—Jeff
LePere.
Amen.
STUART
GOLDMAN
is a former
music critic
for the Los
Angeles
Times and music
editor of the L.A.
Weekly.
HETERODOXY
PAGE 15
Law Firm Head Faces Ouster;
Associate Charges Sex Harassment
O
by JUDITH SCHUMANN WEIZNER
liver "Bud" Kilkenny, one of the
founding partners of Kilkenny and
Katz, has been removed from his
firm's letterhead and restricted to writing briefs pending final disposition of
a complaint brought before the State Office of
Gender Affairs following charges of sexual
harassment made by Heather Harris, a thirtytwo-year-old associate at the firm. Harris
alleges that Kilkenny's fifteen-year-old son,
Oliver "Buddy" Kilkenny Jr., made offensive
remarks about her while making a telephone call
from his father's office several months ago.
The alleged incident occurred when young
Kilkenny, a freshman at Dolley Madison High School
who has no sister, was permitted to skip classes and
accompany his father to work on "Take Your Daughter to
Work Day" on the condition that he write a report on
activities at the firm from a female point of view. His
notes for this report have been cited as corroborating
Harris's charges.
Young Kilkenny began the day by observing his
father in court. After lunch, in a phone conversation with
a friend who was at home suffering from an attack of the
flu, Buddy was overheard by Harris to say, "She's got
Rolls Royce headlights on a Volkswagon chassis." Although Buddy had thought he was alone in his father's
office, Harris had entered the room to place a brief on the
senior Kilkenny's desk and had thus heard the automotivereference. As she is the only woman in the firm, she
concluded that the remark referred to her and approached
the firm's harassment coordinator to lodge a complaint.
No stranger to sexual harassment, Heather Harris
has creatively weathered significant challenges to her
sex. Determined to make the high school football team
despite her relatively small stature, and denied the right to
try out for the team because of her gender, she signed up for
scrimmage as "Harry" Harris. "Harry" was chosen for the
team on the basis of "his" speed and uncanny ability to
squeeze into and out of extremely tight spots. When
"Harry's" true nature was discovered she was sidelined,
but she appealed the coach's decision and won the right to
participate fully after threatening a discrimination suit that
would have cost the high school funding for its after-school
abortion clinic.
After breaking both shoulders during her first varsity
game, Harris quit the team and began to take her schoolwork more seriously. Accepted by Stimpson-MacKinnon
College for Womyn, she received excellent marks. By the
time she graduated Harris had far exceeded the number of
discrimination and rape complaints applicants must file to
be considered for acceptance by the college's law school.
Once in law school, Harris earned perfect grades,
making law review at the end of her first semester. Although she had interned during summer vacations only in
women's law firms, upon graduation she determined to
plunge into the wider world and, turning down a chance to
clerk for Superior Court Judge Penelope Loveless, went to
work at Kilkenny and Katz.
She had been there only two months when she was
OLIVER "BUDDY" KILKENNY, JR.
written by a young female attorney, had received the grade
of C-plus. Buddy's teacher had noted that she gave him this
mediocre mark because, while she thought the diary was a
well-written, accurate portrayal of a typical day in the life
of a female attorney, she also felt that his descriptions of
this attorney's repeated humiliations at the hands of male
colleagues and of her attempted rape by a judge in chambers did not convey a sufficient sense of victimization.
The state *s investigator concluded that although the report
showed that Buddy had only a limited understanding of the
problems faced by women in today's society, there were
insufficient grounds for stripping his father of his right to
practice law. Charges against the elder Kilkenny
were dropped.
Harris then appealed to the Federal Office of Gender Affairs, which has broader powers than the State
Office of Civil Rights.
This agency's investigation into Buddy's background revealed that three of his friends had been in
trouble at school for low-level sexual harassment on
several occasions. This evidence of association with persons known to be insensitive provided a Gender Affairs
investigator with the necessary grounds for a warrant to
search Buddy's bedroom for the notes he had made for his
report. The notes, in the form of a drawing made in the
courtroom on the morning in question, show a roomful of
men cowering before a stylishly dressed, shapely attorney
in high heels who is holding a chair and a whip as if
training a lion. The judge sits on his haunches atop a
barrel licking the back of his right hand while the court
stenographer is poking at the bailiff with a nail file.
An expert on women's issues subpoenaed by the
Office of Gender Affairs for the trial testified that the
drawing revealed a general willingness to ridicule women,
a lack of respect for the professional accomplishments of
women, and a personality prone to rape.
Under the new federal guidelines for Gender Respect, the elder Kilkenny can be held responsible for his
son's attitudes since Buddy is under 16. And, since the
incident occurred in the father's law office, Kilkenny
senior is liable for dismissal just as if he had committed the
harassment.
Stopped by reporters this morning as she entered her
office, Harris was asked whether she had considered the
impact Kilkenny's dismissal mighthaveonherfuture at the
firm. "I don't see a problem here," she said. "Any attempt
at retaliation would be pretty obvious, and when it comes
time forme to be considered for a partnership, the Reprisal
Provision of the Glass Ceiling Act will prevent any untoward actions on their part. Actually, I think this will prove
to have been an excellent career move."
victimized by young Kilkenny. Testifying before investigators for the State Office of Civil Rights, he swore that the
remark had nothing at all to do with Harris or any other
woman, but that he and his friend had been discussing a
customized car belonging to a mutual friend. The teenager
also indicated that if Harris had knocked before entering
the room, she wouldn't have overheard anything. He noted
that on several occasions that day he had seen men leave the
area of the water cooler when Harris approached and
suggested that perhaps she had deliberately entered the
office without knocking so as to avoid a further blow to her
ego. This remark was ordered stricken from the record
when Harris burst into tears.
In an effort to discover the young man's general Ms.Weizner's last piece appeared in the March issue of
attitude toward women, the State Office of Civil Rights Heterodoxy.
subpoenaed Buddy's "Take Your Daughter to Work Day"
report. The report, in the form of a diary purportedly