July 10, 1997
Full Flaps
Relearning
the Alphabet
In their capitulation to Congress and parents' groups over the labeling
of program content, the television networks consented with barely a whimper.
The sole demurrer, NBC, rather politely pointed out the long-term consequences
of this pattern, apparently finding it sufficient to merely caution against
the inevitable imposition of police state powers. Congress, with the generosity
born of friendly persuasion, has promised a moratorium on censorial implementation,
confident that the networks will see the wisdom of compliance. The direction
couldn't be more clear (as the vote to kill the NEA subtly reminds), and
thus one would think that with their "voluntary" agreement to
implement the S, V, L, D and FV ratings symbols denoting sexual content,
violence, profane language, suggestive dialogue and fantasy violence, the
industry might have salvaged a trace of self-respect by at least proposing
the addition of the scarlet letter of our dissembling times, the H for hypocrisy.
The lock-down on the country's discourse is sanctimony gone epidemic, an
enervating contagion which, of course, offers a constant and full diet of
buffoonish hilarity. Few within officialdom remain unafflicted, with contesting
factions pummeling each other for holier-than-thou honors over undifferentiated
issues.
Before us presently is the ludicrousness of the Senate campaign finance
hearings, with each wing of state capitalism demanding of the other show-us-the-money
accountability. Huh? You'll find little hint of sheepishness in this vulgar
jousting and more bass continuo than one could have believed imaginable.
The Republicans envision this forum -- chaired by their current thespian,
Senator Fred Thompson -- as formal payback for the ignominy of Democrat
corporatism's siphoning off Republicans' traditional contributor base. In
the tilt of affluence vs. affluence, Thompson is thrusting into the grave
to cuff around Ron Brown and the success of the Commerce Department in its
colossal filling of big business coffers. Certainly this has been maddening
for the Republicans, watching the "left" assuming like characteristics
and benefits, but rather amusing in this summer of Travolta and Cage writ
large. Does this mean that anyone under 17 must be accompanied by a parent
or adult guardian when watching the hearings?
Concurrently, the fruits of our national leadership ensemble are on display
at the state and local level, and no more dramatically than in California.
The squabbling between ascendent Wing H1, and its loyal opposition, Wing
H2, over welfare reform is as good a showcase as we have for the medievalist
distinctions with which the legislative class indulges itself. The well-fed
and well-connected inveighing against each other over how best to motivate
the now-legally criminalized poor toward unavailable livelihoods leaves
us breathless in envisaging, for instance, future recommendations for weaning
the state's farmers and vintners from six prosperous decades of dependency
teat.
Were there available a gradated ratings system for denial, the country would
go off the chart. How the integral unsavoriness of big-money capitalism
fails to engender even rudimentary shame in the elected beneficiaries who
usher and oversee its dealings is beyond comprehension. The public's customary
moral perimeter is no match for the assault of political avarice; its influence
and voice are a mite against the congressional ponderosity and caterwaul
which has tied up the McCain-Feingold ban on soft money. One would think
that network news divisions, heretofore complicit in assigning this fulsome
phenomenon to the natural order of things, might link the coercion of its
entertainment programming to the essential workings of coalition government's
larger agenda.
Congress' offensive against the entertainment culture is, in equal parts,
a consequence of its electoral strategy of wooing upscale suburbanites (who
would have their sheltered kids molded to the point of cultural autism),
a concomitant Southern strategy desirous of the imprimatur of fundamentalist
preachers, and a sense that the lowbrow coarseness of most televised fare
is unbecoming of the high ideals and intrinsic propriety of its notional
America. Never mind that modern capitalism owes its development and continuation
to access to the tube, that sophisticated niche marketing is based on variety
and multiplicity within the entertainment/cultural nexus, and that entertainment
is the country's largest export product. The barons of our consolidated
politics look with forlorn mistiness to the bipartisan refuge of the 1950s
and the consolations of an era without major domestic complexities, where
a Bob Hope double entendre constituted salaciousness and controversy was
exemplified by quiz show scandals and whether or not Arthur Godfrey was
justified in firing Julius La Rosa.
Of course, well-recompensed American workers producing American products
typified that idyll, and surely any notion then of politicians financially
rewarding businesses for leaving the country for offshore cheap labor markets
was inconceivable. You could confidently make the case that the subsequent
undermining of U.S. workers has greatly occasioned the soothing, mesmeric
mass appeal television and film holds out to them. Who can blame workers,
with their inerrant sense of the system as a pernicious crap shoot, if they
buy into the fantasy that becoming a movie star like Fred Thompson offers
a realistic possibility for reversing their condition. The centers of power
certainly concur with such aspirations for self-betterment; they know more
precisely than anyone the potential for accrual the casino economy provides.
It is power's traditional unease with the concept of liberty as exercised
by others -- i.e., the lower orders' undiminished appetite for the media-generated
possibilities and diversity of a capitalism they take at face value
-- that vitiates what currently passes for national debate.
There is much the networks have to consider as they emerge blinderless into
this brave new world. Beheld, there are extrapolations as far as the eye
can see, and one might suggest that the Constitution be considered as a
guaranteed guide to the terrain. As a first excursion, the nightly news
could place a ratings box on screen whenever the House or Senate is used
as a story backdrop. The letters PY should be sufficient, as in peee
yewww.
--Copyright John Hutchison
1997
TAILSPIN
Connect the Dots
As I was reading the San Francisco Chronicle
the other morning, I felt my brain begin to stretch out in odd directions
like a Macarena-loving ameba. On the front page, which prompted the contortions,
two articles competed for attention. One, headlined "Giant Flood Engulfed
Ancient Mars," traced the journey of the tiny Sojourner rover across
the Red Planet, gathering evidence that, at least a billion years ago, torrents
of water hurtled down from the Martian highlands and inundated thousands
of miles of land to a depth of hundreds of feet. The other, entitled "Sacramento
Showdown On Welfare," described Governor Pete Wilson's vetoing (on
the grounds that it encouraged dependency) a Democrat-sponsored bill designed
to meet new federal requirements and move California welfare recipients
slowly into low-paying or nonexistent jobs. These two events exist in the
same universe, my order-seeking mind reasoned; therefore, they must be related.
But how?
Obsessed, I stared at the problem head-on but failed to come up with a solution.
Finally, in desperation, I opted for another approach, one so oblique as
to appear irrelevant. Utilizing a kind of inductive triangulation, I focused
on a third element, far removed from either the floodplains of Mars or the
Sacramento political arena: recent attempts to clean up the Chesapeake Bay.
This unorthodox method did indeed produce an answer to my question.
* * *
At this time of year, the Chesapeake is lined with luxuriously leafy trees
and fertile farmland extending all the way to the water's edge. Gentle waves
unroll against the shore, slightly cooling the hot summer air. Old-fashioned
skipjacks and less quaint boats criss-cross the bay, laden with croakers
and drumfish and shad or carrying soft crab catches from Tangier Island
to the wholesale market in Crisfield. A region that inspires fierce local
loyalties among its inhabitants, the Chesapeake is also the largest estuary
in the United States, measuring about 200 miles from north to south and
draining a watershed that begins near Cooperstown, New York.
In the early 1970's, the residents of tidewater Maryland and Virginia began
to notice that the fish population was declining. The black-striped rockfish
that people like nature writer Tom Horton remembered catching as a boy --
and eating fried in cornmeal -- were disappearing. Oysters that used to
be harvested by the millions of bushels were becoming hard to find, and
they weren't as big or as tasty. Ospreys that had returned year after year
to nest on the same harbor pilings were no longer to be seen. The water
was murky. Years of careless use were taking their toll: the bay was dying.
After a decade of investigation, the largest political organizations in
the area -- the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the states of Maryland,
Pennsylvania, and Virginia, and the District of Columbia -- embarked on
a remarkable enterprise to bring the area back to life. From the beginning,
the members insisted that responsibility for management decisions and resources
must be shared. Emphatically results-oriented, they outlined three initial
target areas that needed repairing -- nutrient overenrichment, diminishing
underwater grasses, and toxic pollution. Emphatically flexible, they reshaped
their goals as they learned more about the needs of the region, making them
more specific (114,000 acres of recovered grasses by the year 2005; a 40
percent reduction in nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorous by the year
2000). They added new ones (the restoration of forest buffers along rivers
and streams; the extension of the area covered to include tributaries upstream).
They opened the restoration partnership to 1,650 local governments and instituted
a multifaceted campaign to educate the public in the ways and means of bay
preservation.
This intensive effort has worked no miracles, but during the past 15 years
it has begun to reverse the damage incurred over the past several centuries.
Some programs have been more successful than others. Ospreys are flourishing,
but oysters remain sadly sparse. The entry of both phosphorous and nitrogen
into the bay has decreased, but the flow of nitrogen is still well above
the level targeted for the year 2000. Because of a slow start under previous
administrations, Virginia lags behind Maryland in its cleanup. Industries
such as Bethlehem Steel in Maryland and Smithfield Foods in Virginia continue
to spew out toxic wastes despite efforts to regulate them. Rapid increases
in population often threaten to negate technological advances in sewage
treatment, agricultural management, and habitat restoration. Nevertheless,
the water is cleaner, the wildlife are more plentiful, and the bay is generally
a more pleasant place.
On the eastern shore of Virginia, where the Chesapeake meets the Atlantic,
nestles the town of Cape Charles, once a bustling resort and now -- since
the construction of the 17-mile bridge-tunnel at Norfolk -- a reviving vacation
and bedroom community. I stood on its sandy beach at the end of June, as
hundred-degree heat bleached the sky and the water until they resembled
a badly overexposed photograph. Swimmers appeared as black silhouettes,
and black arcs outlined the edges of breaking waves. Offshore, a fishing
boat headed quickly for the harbor. Then the photograph turned black, rent
only by jagged lines of lightning. The wind bent the trees nearly to the
ground. Rain battered the beach and flooded the low-lying streets, carefully
constructed to direct the runoff into storm drains and not into the ground.
A messy squall, not the sort that washes everything clean, it left behind
piles of debris. But it also punched holes in the oppressive air that had
smothered the coast, enabling people breathe easily once more.
* * *
If we return now to the question I posed earlier about the connection between
two Chronicle articles, the answer is simple: There is no connection,
none at all, unless we create one ourselves. Natural forces occur
as they occur, without any thought for the precious human plans they are
disrupting. A summer storm or a Martian flood will always find a way to
follow its own pattern, no matter how feverishly we try to control or eradicate
it. Similarly, poor people will always adopt whatever methods they need
for survival, no matter how frantically the authorities try to discipline
or exterminate them.
But the Chesapeake Bay experience suggests that making connections is constructive,
whereas refusing to make them is definitely not. Once the decision was made,
out of necessity, to clean up the bay in earnest, one link led inevitably
to another. The small number of partners gradually and naturally increased
until every inhabitant and every organization in the area was included.
The area itself grew as well, as it discovered the need for links with other,
surrounding regions. And one goal led to another, as scientists realized
what fisherfolk had known for generations: that everything in and near the
bay is interrelated. To leave out any of the partners, to omit any element
in the cleanup, would open up the possibility that a rogue operator -- a
polluter; a rapidly spreading species of algae -- could scuttle the entire
expedition.
In the same way, once lawmakers -- and the people who elect them -- decide
that a universal living wage is necessary for the health of the community,
they will inevitably gravitate toward far-reaching partnerships to bring
it about. The problem is getting them to recognize that action is necessary
before it's too late. Once they do, they will discover that a living wage
is useless without adequate child care, that adequate child care is useless
without sufficient health insurance, that adequate health insurance is useless
without reliably safe drinking water, and so on, all the way perhaps to
lumpy gray Barnacle Bill in the Ares Vallis.
--Copyright Betsey Culp 1997