Jewish World Review Oct. 14, 2005 / 11 Tishrei, 5765

Adrift in a sea of phoniness

By David Gelernter

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Insincerity IS the new theme of American politics. Americans used to be famous for openness — they were naive, foreigners said, but absolutely straightforward.

During much of the last century, Ernest Hemingway and his "B.S. meter" were famous. Hemingway claimed an infallible ability to identify phonies, and his imaginary detector seemed as quintessentially American as his close-cropped, hard-hitting sentences. If Hemingway came back to Earth for an American holiday, his B.S. meter would be pegged permanently at maximum.

Here's an example of insincerity at work. It comes from the left, which seems to specialize nowadays in bitter, angry, nasty declarations that are phony right down to the ground.

Recently, Vice President Cheney and Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) disagreed. Rangel denounced Cheney, rudely. The VP denounced him back. Rangel's response: Cheney must apologize.

First, why should Cheney apologize and not Rangel? More important, note the ever more popular idea that politicians must apologize on cue like trained seals whenever a noisy enough group orders them to. Yet every 5-year-old knows that a coerced apology has got to be insincere. Otherwise it wouldn't need to be coerced.

Our willingness to traffic in such nonsense shows a dangerous tendency to disregard reasoning, logical context, the meaning of words. How else to understand the latest Bill Bennett story? It reads like science fiction — live from the planet Bozo, a man whose enemies know by magic that he actually means the exact opposite of what he says.

A few weeks ago, Bennett said on his radio program that X is a stupid idea; then he said that if you believe X, you might as well believe Y. But Y is "impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible." One thing we know for sure: Bennett is against Y. He thinks that Y is "impossible," is "ridiculous," is "morally reprehensible." "Y" was the idea that aborting all black babies would cut the crime rate.

So the left jumped all over him. Bizarrely enough, the White House chimed in. (A Republican White House opening fire on Bennett is like the Joint Chiefs bombing their own front lines.) Yet no one who read or heard Bennett's actual statement in context could possibly have believed that Bennett is racist or had talked like a racist.

But our public life is so deeply phony that, although a few stalwarts defended him, no one pointed out the gross hypocrisy of his accusers. (No one I've heard, anyway.) Those accusers knew perfectly well that he was not promoting a racist view of American life, he was denouncing a racist view — loudly and clearly, without a shadow of ambiguity.

What part of "impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible" did they not understand?

Universities are the mighty fortresses of the American left. The assertion that American universities encourage a freewheeling clash of ideas might be the mother of all phoniness in the United States today.

Richard Lamm is the former Democratic governor of Colorado (1975-1987), now a free-thinking, self-described "progressive conservative" who teaches public policy at the University of Denver. In the journal of the conservative National Assn. of Scholars, Lamm has written about the time he submitted an article about racism to a university publication called the Source — which is run by the administration, not by students.

Lamm's submission compared the harm wrought by racism to the good that comes out of working to overcome obstacles. His article discussed the success of the Japanese, Jews and Cubans in the U.S.; all three have suffered bigotry and prospered. Mexicans in America have done less well. But Mexicans and Cubans are equally Latino and face similar kinds of prejudice. If Cubans have thrived and Mexicans haven't, racism can't possibly be the whole story.

Exactly the sort of provocative, challenging article any university would be proud to publish, right?

Only kidding. Lamm reports that the Source rejected his piece: "too controversial"; then he appealed to the provost, and then the chancellor. They agreed with the editors. Too controversial.

According to the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, "administrators countered that the decision not to run Lamm's article was more an issue of editorial space than academic freedom." Maybe that's what university officials were thinking. But no one in this news article denies that they said what Lamm says they said.

If you believe that our universities promote freewheeling debate, that Bill Bennett is a racist and that the United States will be a better place if Dick Cheney apologizes to Charlie Rangel, I have a bridge for sale; you might want to check it out. Maybe I'll just list it on EBay and wait for the crowd of bidders.