Subject to Debate
Summer Follies
The best thing about my summer in the country was
that I didn't have a TV and usually got to the market after the tiny
clutch of papers had already been snatched up by the local
information junkies. So I missed a lot of Really Important News. Gary
Condit, who? Most of my friends believe he had "something to do" with
Chandra Levy's disappearance, despite the lack of any evidence or
motive or even credible scenario for same. This shows how desperately
we long for life to be more interesting than it really is, but will
somebody please tell me why the people at Buzzflash.com and other
hardcore Democratic propagandists want progressives, liberals,
Dems--whatever Nation readers are calling themselves these
days--to rally to the defense of this slimeball? He doesn't even have
a good voting record! (During the Contract With America years he
voted with Newt Gingrich 77 percent of the time, and he has been
pressed often to switch parties.) Count me out--I used up all my
humor and worldliness on Bill and Monica, not to mention their
numerous real-life equivalents. My position on sexually predatory
politicians, with their interns (and aides and flight attendants), is
the same as for the ever-popular aging male professor/bushy-tailed
young grad student combo: These people, both the men and the women,
are on their own. If half of Congress had to go home in
disgrace to Modesto, and half the intern pool learned the hard way
that there's more to getting ahead than giving head, why would that
be bad?
About the Author
Katha Pollitt
In sports news, we had the story of Danny Almonte,
the 14-year-old 12-year-old who pitched a perfect game for his Bronx
Little League team, leading them to a third-place finish in the
international championship. Bring on President Bush and Mayor
Giuliani, the television cameras and the ticker-tape parade! The
unearthing of Danny's true birth certificate, showing he was born in
1987, not 1989, was spun out in the press for days on end, with vast
quantities of shocked fake-solicitous moralizing ladled on by every
sports commentator in America and then some. Said sports agent Drew
Rosenhaus on CNN's TalkBack Live, "If you start cheating and
start making excuses for that, you're destroying the American dream
here." In quest of baseball glory, Danny's parents lied and exploited
him, messed with his head and, it was believed at one point, hadn't
even enrolled him in school--all very bad. But what do you expect in
our sports-and-entertainment-addled country? As Joyce Purnick pointed
out in an acid column in the New York Times, no one makes a
fuss about New York City public school kids who, against great odds,
win writing competitions or debating championships or excel
academically (not even the Board of Education, which had trouble
coming up with a list of relevant names)--and then we wonder why so
many inner-city kids blow off their education in favor of a "dream"
about being a rapper, a movie star, a model, a sports hero. The Bronx
is full of teenage Dominican immigrants like Danny, who've dropped
out of their awful schools, where they learned nothing, to face bleak
futures in the subproletariat, without even a chance at getting their
pictures in the paper unless they happen to be run over by a drunken
policeman. Where's the outrage about that?
Perhaps it's
being expended on superpublicist-to-the-stars Lizzie Grubman's
automotive rampage in the parking lot of the Hamptons' Conscience
Point Inn. Or perhaps it's been kidnapped by the Rev. Al Sharpton,
who's taking a break from black-Hispanic bridge-building over target
practice on Vieques to feud with right-wing New York Post
columnist Rod Dreher, who questioned the good taste of 22-year-old
singer Aaliyah's funeral procession down Fifth Avenue: "A
traffic-snarling, horse-drawn cortege in honor of a pop singer most
people have never heard of? Give us a break!" Dreher went on to
cruelly contrast Aaliyah's song lyrics with the poetry of Byron,
deserving recipient of lavish obsequies from a grateful nation. In
response Sharpton called for a boycott of the Post and its
advertisers: "It was ugly and divisive. She was degraded," he said.
"What would make her not worthy of this type of
funeral?"
Too right. I can't think of a more important
issue than celebrity funerals for a self-described national black
leader to be addressing right now! Unless, of course, it is the
absence of black faces on television, the pet cause of Kweisi Mfume,
president of the NAACP. Syndicated columnist Cynthia Tucker and
others have charged that Mfume was pushing this issue in order to
promote himself as a talk-show host, although media imagery and
representation is a standard issue for identity-based organizations
from NOW to the Anti-Defamation League. In any case, Mfume, a
national figure and former Congressman who appeared on cable for
years, would make at least as worthy a regular commentator as, oh I
don't know, the racially humorous Don Imus, or Rush Limbaugh, or
Chris Matthews. I'd watch.
The real issue, though, is that
television is the least of black America's problems. Sure, it's
absurd that all the young nudnicks on Friends, Will &
Grace, Dawson's Creek and other top-ranked shows my
daughter loves are white, but life is short and time's a-wasting. How
much energy does the nation's largest black organization want to
spend shoehorning an African-American best friend into Dharma
& Greg or getting Clarence Page more face time on CNN? It was
left to one Emory Curtis, whose essay "Blacks on TV or Educate Our
Kids?" was posted on the Black Radical Congress e-mail list in
August, to make the obvious point. For three years the NAACP has been
making a major issue out of the prime-time lineup. Where is its
crusade against the terrible state of education for black children?
Curtis notes that black kids trail by almost every measure: On last
year's National Assessment of Educational Progress, one in three
white fourth graders performed at grade level, which is itself pretty
shocking--but only one in twenty black fourth graders did. In
California, three out of four black fourth and eighth graders were at
the lowest level, "below basic"--about the same as eight years
ago.
Well, summer's over. Time to turn off the set?
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