A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

  Americans who had supported Bill’s right to remain President even though he had kissed Monica Lewinsky began to turn sharply against him when he bombed Serbian schools.

  Here in the US the war found almost all Democrats in Congress marshaled for war. The heroic exceptions were twenty-six Democrats in the House, led by Dennis Kucinich of Ohio—himself of Irish-Croat ancestry—who leagued with a majority of House Republicans twice to deny Clinton legitimization for his war. Most liberals favored the bombing. Gross was the spectacle of Susan Sontag brigading herself with Zbigniew Brzezinski and Madeleine Albright in terming this bombing campaign “a just war.”

  June 30

  A fifteen-year-old girl attending a very ritzy liberal arts school in the Northeast told me last week that 80 percent of the kids in her class were on Prozac, Dexedrine or Ritalin, either separately or in combo. The pretext used by the school authorities for the legal prescription of these drugs is Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), or ADHD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. The student is asked three questions along the lines of “Do you find yourself daydreaming or looking out the window during the school?” Say yes, as 100 percent of all kids around the world throughout all human history will obviously do if they are truthful, and the kids’ parents are urged to give the school a go-ahead to pump in the brew of uppers and anti-depressants.

  At this particular school, my informant told me, there’s also a flourishing under-the-counter market in the same drugs. She herself had resisted the school’s urgings to take Ritalin, but said that there is heavy pressure to do so, not least because a student on Ritalin or Dexedrine can, according to one theory, get perked for the brief period of an exam to perform better than a student who is drug free. She gave a heartrending description of a friend who had, by dint of the usual preposterous questions, had been diagnosed as having ADD, and who had been pushed into taking Ritalin and Prozac by the school and her parents, much against her will. Previously a vivacious and jolly young thing, she is now strung-out, morose, thoroughly dispirited and probably on the way to expulsion.

  Eric Harris, one of the Columbine killers, was on Luvox. Like Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil, Luvox is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor or SSRI. The idea is to change the amount of serotonin reaching the brain and thus prevent depression. Kip Kinkel, the kid from Springfield, OR, who shot his parents and two students to death, was on Prozac.

  One particularly gloomy view of Ritalin comes from the Drug Enforcement Agency, which issued this statement after a 1996 conference on ADHD and Ritalin: “The use of stimulants [such as Ritalin] for the short-term improvement of behavior and under-achievement may be thwarting efforts to address the children’s real issues, both on an individual and societal level. The lack of long-term positive results with the use of stimulants and the specter of previous and potential stimulant abuse epidemics, give cause to worry about the future. The dramatic increase in the use of [Ritalin] in the 1990s should be viewed as a marker or warning to society about the problems children are having and how we view and address them.”

  July 7

  Back in the age of innocence, in the 1950s, kids ordered up their firepower out of catalogues and you’d see students heading to school on bus or subway, toting guns they’d be using later that day in the ROTC drills. Back then parents fretted over the horror of comics and switchblades. Let little Albert dip his nose too deeply into the blood-drenched comics being put out by publishers such as William Gaines of Mad magazine fame, and he’d surely be set on the slippery slope of crime and slaughter.

  In fact Gaines was hauled before a committee run by that tireless grandstander, Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, who also held famous hearings at the time into racketeering and the Mob. Here’s an extract from the transcript of the committee’s encounter with Gaines, as it appears in Frank Jacobs’s very funny The Mad World of William M. Gaines, published by Bantam in 1972. Gaines is being questioned by Hebert Beaser, one of the committee’s counsels:

  BEASER: Is that the sole test of what you put in your magazines, whether it sells? Is there any limit of what you wouldn’t put in your magazine because you thought a child shouldn’t see or read about it?

  GAINES: No, I wouldn’t say there is any limit for the reason you outlined. My only limits are bounds of good taste. What I consider good taste.

  BEASER (probing): Then you think a child cannot in any way, shape or manner, be hurt by anything that the child reads or sees?

  GAINES: I do not believe so.

  BEASER (still probing): There would be no limit actually to what you’d put in magazines.

  GAINES: Only within the bounds of good taste.

  KEFAUVER (doubtful): Here is your May issue. This seems to be an arm with a bloody ax holding a woman’s head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that’s in good taste?

  GAINES: Yes, sir. I do, for the cover of a horror comic. A cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding the head a little higher, so that the blood could be seen dripping from it, and moving the body over a little so that the neck of the body could be seen to be bloody.

  (Murmurs, stirrings among spectators.)

  KEFAUVER (still doubtful): You’ve got blood coming out of her mouth.

  GAINES: A little.

  KEFAUVER: And here’s blood on the ax. I think most adults are shocked by that. Now here’s a man with a woman in a boat and he’s choking her to death with a crowbar. Is that in good taste?

  GAINES: I think so.

  HANCOCK: How could it be worse?

  HENNINGS (coming to the rescue): Mr. Chairman, I don’t think it is really the function of our committee to argue with this gentleman.

  Jacobs reports that Gaines more than held his own in the initial hours of testimony, but then faded abruptly, seeming harassed and defensive. The reason was that he’d ingested a bracing dose of Dexedrine, thinking he’d ride through the session on its coattails only to find that the drug’s effects had worn off abruptly, leaving him high and dry.

  July 9

  One of the joys of talking to Larry Pratt, President of the Gun Owners of America, is that one can hear Charlton Heston denounced as a cocktail-swilling, brie-nibbling Hollywood sellout, only too delighted to betray the Second Amendment if it means he gets his face on network TV and taken seriously on Capitol Hill.

  And it’s true. Heston’s NRA collapsed in the wake of the Columbine killings in Colorado. Only a combo of House conservatives and liberals was able to beat back the recent gun bill. Even so Pratt still fears that another house bill could get conferenced with New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg’s Senate Bill 254, which could introduce laws making it all but impossible for gun shows to continue to operate. Liberals hate gun shows, regarding them as the seedbeds of all that’s wrong with America. This is nonsense. Gun shows do of course attract people eager to exercise their Second Amendment rights, collect or exchange various types of firearms and so forth. They are also vibrant rendezvous for important elements of popular American culture. They are anti-government, genuinely populist and lots of fun. Which is why the better element, Lautenberg in the lead, wants to do them in.

  Pratt’s solution to the schoolyard killings: let the teachers bear arms, just like they do in South Africa, where one instructor recently gunned down a bellicose student. Pratt also faxed me an interesting recent study on urban delinquency, put out by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (part of the Justice Department) in 1994. This was a survey of delinquency in Rochester, Pittsburgh, and Denver, tracking delinquency “pathways,” as affected by drugs, school attendance, parental oversight, gang membership and so forth. The study shows clearly enough that one way of keeping kids out of trouble is to let them carry legal guns. Out of 1,000 boys and girls surveyed in Rochester in the early 1980s, some 7 percent of the boys owned illegal guns by the ninth and tenth grades. Legal guns are held by 3 percent. There is a strong correlation between illegal guns and delinquency and drug use. Seventy-four
percent of the illegal gun owners commit street crimes, 24 percent commit gun crimes and 41 percent use drugs. Then the Justice Department study continues, “Boys who own legal firearms, however, have much lower rates of delinquency and drug use and are even slightly less delinquent than nonowners of guns” (my italics).

  July 14

  Gore and George W. are alike as two peas, right down to the same slightly dazed look that comes of having big-time politicians as fathers and interesting encounters with powerful drugs in their formative years. I don’t know anything about Gore’s mother, but Barbara Bush was one of the nastier women I’ve ever interviewed (a half-hour session in 1979, when George Sr. was fighting Ronald Reagan for the nomination). Maybe there’s a difference here.

  In fact a debate between Al and George W. on the subject of parents—their parents—might be the sole means of putting together an exciting debate in 2000. Imaginatively staged, with both men injected with sodium pentothal, and moderated by Geraldo Rivera and Gail Sheehy, such an encounter might scrape off the dreadful rime of banality that cakes their public personae and reveal the wounded egos beneath.

  As a force capable of reinvigorating our political DNA the left is in terrible shape. The radical right—which has contributed 80 percent of the political energy in the country for the past twenty years—is almost as impotent although more healthily endowed with a hostility to state power. The left will never break away from the Democratic Party to any important degree, since the institutional ties between labor and Democrats will never allow it. Who else might precipitate a reinvigoration of the system?

  July 21

  You would have thought that after Chappaquiddick the Kennedy clan would have imposed a permanent ban on any visits, or attempted visits, to Martha’s Vineyard. The problem in that family seems to be an incapacity to assess odds properly or absorb the lessons of the past. So here we have John, arriving late with his wife and sister-in-law at that airport in New Jersey, calling it wrong. He must have known he would have to land at dusk or after. He knew he would have to rely on his eyes, since he didn’t know how to fly on instruments. At this point a prudent person would have thought twice. A prudent person wouldn’t have skied down a slope, playing a ball game and holding a video camera. A prudent person …

  It’s a miracle half the ruling class isn’t wiped out around Martha’s Vineyard every year. That hateful island is often shrouded in fog; normal commercial flights are canceled and the rich then whistle up charter flights, often with pilots either weary or half drunk. Even the ferry from Woods Hole isn’t entirely safe for the big-wigs. Back in the Vietnam era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was nearly wrestled over the side by an anti-war zealot.

  I’m not sure what the exact averages are, per person mile flown, but small planes are unwise forms of conveyance. Helicopters are even more lethal. Even so, the last time, back in the early 1980s, I was on Martha’s Vineyard I was desperate for escape, so much so I declined even to wait for the ferry. Instead I chartered a small plane, instructing the pilot to fly myself and my daughter to Keene, NH. That’s the sort of effect the island has on one.

  August 11

  Steve Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago, and John Donohue III, a law prof at Stanford, have been circulating a paper—reported in the Chicago Tribune on August 8—arguing that the legalizing of abortion in the early 1970s has contributed to the falling crime rate in the 1990s. Indeed they claim that legalized abortion may account for as much as half the overall crime drop between 1991 and 1997. Levitt says abortion “provides a way for the would-be mothers of those kids who are going to lead really tough lives to avoid bringing them into the world.” The authors cite statistics from five states that legalized abortion before the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973. These five states with high abortion rates in the early 1970s had greater crime drops in the 1990s.

  The Trib’s story quotes Cory Richards, a policy wonk at the Guttmacher Institute, as saying, “This is an argument for women not being forced to have children they don’t want to have. This is making the point that it’s not only bad for the women, but for children and society.”

  So, from the social-engineering, crime-fighting point of view the reintroduction of the death penalty in 1977 had the legalization of abortion in 1975—the Roe v. Wade decision—as its logical precursor and concomitant. And the death penalty for undesired embryos has had the advantage of being a lot more certain, and cheaper to administer, than the death penalty for undesired adults. I don’t think it’s the way the women’s movement put the choice issue back in the early 1970s, but I can certainly imagine Hillary arguing for abortion as socially therapeutic.

  August 20

  Nabbed back in March for speeding in my 1964 station wagon I finally made it to traffic school last week. Under California law you can thus shield your rashness from the insurance companies, provided there’s at least an eighteenth-month interval from your last citation.

  Down the years, here in the Golden State, I’ve been to a few such sessions, which have to last eight hours. My first such school, back in the late 1980s, was in Riverside, on the eastern margin of the greater Los Angeles area. The composition of the thirty-odd people was 50 percent white, 50 percent black. At all classes the initial routine is for each person to divulge name and cause of citation. In the Riverside class almost all the blacks said they’d been cited for going a few miles over the limit, in urban areas: 30 mph instead of 25. So reasonably enough, all the blacks thought they’d been framed. Almost all the whites had been caught speeding on the highway, doing 70 and over. They all thought they’d been breaking the law.

  My next class, in Santa Cruz, was run by a California Highway Patrol officer who spent most of the session giving us useful hints on how to avoid being caught speeding. In Berkeley a couple years ago, our class was run by a former alcoholic who underwent visible nervous breakdown throughout the eight-hour session, saying the breakdown was prompted by his daughter’s driving skills and her indifference to her father. As he issued our certificates he tearfully thanked us for sharing.

  The class in Eureka last week was run by a former cop from San Diego, who divides his time between running a driving school and representing tax deadbeats before the IRS. He offered a torrent of statistics. The most dangerous time to drive: Friday evening, closely followed by Saturday night, closely followed by Sunday night. The safest day is Tuesday. The last twenty-four-hour period in California in which no one was killed on the roads was on May 1, 1991 (which turns out to have been a Wednesday).

  Amid this deluge of numbers he paused to review the best way to deal with the officer as he approaches your car. It’s best, he said, to have your hands up on the wheel. The instructor plunged into cop’s-eye view about what it was like to approach a car. Death could be waiting. There was no job, he told us, more perilous than that of the police officer.

  I told him I didn’t think this claim was true; that in fact police work is among the safer occupations, that the likelihood of being killed in the line of duty was exceedingly slim. He held his ground, but the figures support my view. If you tot up the numbers of local police, sheriff’s deputies, state police, special police (a mysterious category in the US Statistical Abstract) and all sworn officers both full- and part-time, the total in 1992 was 661,103. The total of police killed accidentally and feloniously in that year across the country was 129, which seems to be about average in any year. This gives a death rate per 100,000 cops of twenty, most of whom are probably killed in car crashes. The rate of death per 100,000 in coal mining was thirty-eight in 1995, making it the riskiest job, followed by other forms of mining (twenty-five), oil and gas extraction (twenty-three), agriculture, forestry and fishing (twenty-two). If cops walked more and drove less, they’d probably halve their death rate, putting them on par with people in the electrical, gas and sanitary services, at eight or so per 100,000.

  That wasn’t my only tussle of the evening in the traffic class. We tangled again on the subject
of drunk driving. After reciting the savage penalties meted out to those caught driving under the influence of alcohol, the instructor gave an impassioned speech in favor of the pillory of public ridicule and contempt, meaning in this instance that convicted drunks would have to display an orange license tag. I told the class I thought penalties for drunk driving were already out of hand, at least for those who had caused no harm. This intervention was badly timed, because the instructor completed the class by showing a half-hour movie about a teenage drunk who killed a young woman, and his consequent remorse. I felt as though I had somehow argued that the teen drunk killer should have been levied a $10 fine and then handed back his driver’s license. The big disclosure of the evening is that the American Psychiatric Association is putting road rage into its next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, meaning that this nebulous category has now been okayed by shrinks as a bona fide condition, amenable to insured treatment by anti-depressants and kindred potions. Having made road rage official, the shrinks can now begin to coin money off it.

  September 22

  Now it turns out that the greatest writer of the twentieth century, with the possible exception of Flann O’Brien, was nearly put on trial as a traitor after World War II. No, not Ezra Pound, but P. G. Wodehouse. Last week the British Public Records office released files showing that the director of public prosecutions, Sir Theobald Matthew, thought that a trial of Wodehouse would be a tricky prospect, but said that “If Wodehouse ever comes to this country, he should be prosecuted.” In the event, Wodehouse lived in the US continuously from 1944 on.

  Wodehouse broadcast from Germany in 1941, having been marched off to an internment camp in Upper Silesia after the Nazis invaded France and came across the writer working away in his house at Le Touquet, writing one of his very best novels, Joy in the Morning. After he’d spent eleven months in the internment camp, American friends saw a photograph of him and worried about his somewhat emaciated appearance. Wodehouse was soon released and taken to Berlin, where he accepted the request of Werner Plack, a German foreign ministry official he’d known slightly before the war, that he do some broadcasts to America about his experience in the internment camp. The five talks were sequestered by the British authorities for many years. When they were finally released they turned out to be slightly labored, knockabout reminiscences in a jocular vein. Wodehouse evidently enjoyed internment life, as did many Englishmen who, like Wodehouse, regarded public school as the high point of their lives.