Hard to Muzzle (Page 3)

This helps explain some of her more puzzling campaigns. In 1994 Clinton signed a modest bill to help states modernize vocational programs in public high schools. It was called "school to work." Cheney devoted a New York Times Op-Ed article to an attack on the obscure program--because, she wrote, it encouraged young women to consider "nontraditional employment." You might think it slightly hypocritical for the former chairwoman of the NEH and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute to suggest that women should stay in traditional occupations--but the concept of "nontraditional employment" is, of course, threatening to Christian-right activists, who prefer that their girls think about motherhood rather than careers and who worry that "the government" is undermining parental authority.

In 1995 Cheney pulled her complaints together into a book with the modest title Telling the Truth. Tipper Gore had made her name in public policy by targeting dirty rock lyrics; the woman who would succeed her as vice-presidential wife has a loftier target: French philosopher Michel Foucault, who argued that what we call truth is constructed by those who hold power. Telling the Truth declares that Foucault's ideas threaten nothing less than the survival of Western civilization. "If we are to be successful as a culture," Cheney writes, we cannot follow Foucault and "turn away from reason and reality." We must follow the great thinkers of the Enlightenment and "find the will to live in truth.... The answer may very well determine whether we survive." Any grad student in cultural studies would be more than happy to show how her conception of "reason and reality" is not timeless and universal but rather is shaped by culture and experience. For Cheney, Foucault's sinister influence is everywhere. Even Al Gore is a disciple: His book Earth in the Balance, she writes, "is about how the great thinkers of the Enlightenment have led us astray."

If Foucault is one of the big targets of her book, feminism is the other. Attacking "the radical egalitarianism espoused by many feminists," she criticizes "the movement to do away with...competition in the schools"--for example, "in every part of the country, school children are dancing and jumping rope, activities that do not involve competition, instead of playing games like dodgeball, from which a winner emerges." Obviously Lynne Cheney was a girl who liked winning at dodgeball.

Telling the Truth concludes with what Nick Gillespie of the libertarian magazine Reason called "a dizzying whirlwind of innuendo and invective." She argues that the brutal 1994 murder of an ice-cream vendor in Philadelphia exposes the consequences of leftist postmodern theory. As the vendor lay dying in the street, a group of teenage onlookers laughed and danced. Cheney concludes that "people who laugh at a dying man have no sense that a stranger can suffer just as they do." And whose fault is this? "Intellectual elites do no one a favor by sending through society messages that there is no external reality in which we all participate, that there is only the game of the moment, the entertainment of the day." Thus postmodernism may not have killed the ice-cream vendor, but it encouraged the onlookers to laugh at his suffering. Of course, Lynne Cheney doesn't know whether the laughing onlookers had read Foucault; in fact, she knows nothing about them.

The same year she published her book, Cheney became co-host of CNN's Crossfire Sunday. That was shortly after her husband had explored a run for President against Clinton, who at the time--the peak of the Gingrich revolution--seemed vulnerable. On Crossfire she spoke out in favor of school prayer and against handgun controls and raising the minimum wage. She argued that violence in Hollywood movies inspired murder in real life--standard Gingrich stuff.

She left Crossfire Sunday in 1998 and since then has receded from the Op-Ed pages. In 1995 she got seven Op-Eds into print, but according to the Nexis database, she has published only two in 1999 and 2000, one in the Wall Street Journal arguing that schools should tell kids what they need to know instead of allowing them to discover it for themselves, and one in the Dallas Morning News defending phonics as a teaching method.

Her re-emergence at the Republican National Convention this year marked a dramatic return to center stage. For the presidential campaign, she is sticking to the script: While she testified at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing in mid-September that she wants to protect children from media violence--thus hinting of her old culture-wars crusades--her testimony was no more of an appeal to the morality crowd than that of Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joe Lieberman. Still, it's hard to imagine that a person with her ideological zeal, passion for combat and hunger for the spotlight will not unsheath her dagger if the Republicans return to the White House in January.

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