Aggressive Begging, Prison Love and Why the Bad Guys Will Win
What worries me is the upcoming election. As everyone who sees through Sharpton knows, the louder the screeching and the more anguished the outrage, the greater the concern for material rewards. New York has Al Sharpton and Hillary to contend with, the equivalent of my ancestor Odysseus sailing between Scylla and Charybdis. The chronically aggrieved duo look to me like winners. First and foremost they've got "the Old Bag" on their side. The paper of selective record conveniently forgot about Tawana Brawley, Crown Heights, Freddy's Fashion Mart and the rest of the "reverend"'s outrages whilst reporting the meeting between Al Gore and Al Capone Sharpton. Ditto where Lady Macbeth is concerned. Cattle futures, illegal laundering of bribes, perjuries before a grand jury concerning billing records, they're all par for the course when the Times chooses to erode its credibility in favor of its partisan biases.
But what really bothers me are the politicians who are always trying to organize our lives. In Switzerland, a small paradise of a country, nothing is decided by the central government in Bern unless it has first been voted on a) at the commune level, b) at the cantonal level, c) by a national referendum. This is what democracy is all about. Direct democracy, in other words. Not so in the mother of all democracies, Britain, or indeed in the U.S. In America the political and administrative classes seek ever greater control over everything we say, think or do.
In between skiing runs and moonlit parties high up, I read Bob Novak's book, Completing the Revolution: A Vision for Victory in 2000. It is enough to make you give up skiing and start drinking absinthe. Nonstop. The Draft Dodger has outsmarted conservatives in Congress at every turn; the winners of the 1994 Republican landslide reverted to type, acting like the minority party, ever so anxious not to upset the media by fulfilling the mandate handed to them by the people. The Republicans have been inefficient, cowardly, buffoonish, Newt Gingrich-like. Who will ever forget Newt sitting next to the First Liar in front of the cameras and shamelessly pandering? Only a very few have made their case through the courage of their convictions. Novak points out that "they need the courage to be Republicans." Instead, they triangulate a la Clinton and to hell with their principles.
It's called playing not to lose. But as any sportsman will tell you, if you're afraid to lose, you can't win. Novak tells the Republicans just that. Forget the polls and the focus groups. Embrace the religious right. After all, just because scumbags like Geraldo Rivera and Alan Dershowitz call the religious right bigots, it ain't necessarrily so. What the religious right means to me is a lot of law-abiding people who believe in God and who disapprove of violence on tv and in the movies, of underage mothers, of drug-taking and pornography in their living rooms?most decent Americans.
And most decent Americans, I'm sure, would like to see term limits. As Novak says, "A career politician will ponder the evil of term limits every waking hour if it threatens his livelihood." The goal, according to the conservative sage, should be smaller government and more individual freedom. That's easier said than done when one has to deal with rabble-rousers like Sharpton and Hillary. Both are experts at picking the hated yet fascinating scab of racial guilt. Yet however lofty its origin, the doctrine of absolute racial equality is as absurd as the Nazi doctrine of absolute racial purity. Sharpton, the great white baiter, is a prime contradiction of what he preaches. Indeed, the very word "racism" is rapidly losing its meaning thanks to people like Al and Hill. It has gotten so bad that to qualify as a racist today, one needs only to have harbored an unkind thought about someone from another race.
Alas, the race relations industry is doing fine, almost as well as the trial lawyers, following their fleecing of the tobacco industry. Which brings me to why the bad guys will win come November. George Bush has been targeted by these extortionists, and the trial lawyers' mafia is awash with moolah. They are pouring soft money to the Democrats because George Bush, a decent and good man, had the courage to issue a five-point plan to "curb frivolous lawsuits." If ever there was a cancer in America it's frivolous litigation, yet these gangsters are going after George (Eliot Ness) Bush because he dared challenge their Cosa Nostra. But what could one expect from a group that was the first to back and continue to support that other smiling wallet-lifter, Bill Clinton?
It is all very depressing, but I continue to marvel at MUGGER's optimism. Mind you, MUGGER should have been a military man. There is nothing that is more dispiriting just before a battle than a general who looks at the plans and expresses doubts they will work. Napoleon used to rage against his marshals if they showed the slightest fear of failure. He would have loved MUGGER, even if MUGGER had suggested one more charge around 7 p.m. on June 18, 1815. That is when the Imperial Guard, surrounded, refused to surrender and Gen. Cambrone answered, "Merde!" By that time Napo was on his way back to Paris, leaving his shattered brave army behind. I shall emulate the great Corsican on Nov. 5, 2000, and head for Grozny. I am told there are some great real estate opportunities over there.
George Szamuely The Bunker
Prison Love Hillary Clinton's inane remarks about the shooting of Patrick Dorismond were on a par with the rest of her inane campaign. Day after day she inflicts on us her dreary Sunday-school sermons full of vacuous pieties, and laced with a malice born of inordinate ambition. The Mayor's actions, she warned, "have aggravated tensions in the city and have helped drive a wedge between the police and the communities they serve." Well, no, Mrs. Clinton herself had a lot to do with that. Her dishonesty and opportunism is breathtaking even by Clintonian standards. In January she asserted that Amadou Diallo had been "murdered." She was forced to beat a hasty retreat. Then she denounced the New York Police Dept. for being insufficiently diverse. Her loathsome husband chimed in with his claim that Diallo would still be alive today if he had been white. In the meantime, Loretta Lynch, the U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn, is busy investigating the NYPD for possible civil rights abuses. Expect a string of indictments between now and the election.
"I reject, with all my heart, the notion that falling crime rates demand rising mistrust between communities and police," Mrs. Clinton wailed at Riverside Church the other day. "I reject the false choice between effective policing and mutual respect... It is a false choice to say we cannot cut crime and have better community relations. It is a false choice to say that we cannot have safer streets and greater trust and confidence in the police." It is outrageous that the First Lady gets away with this kind of lying. Her attacks on Giuliani are idiotic. There is nothing she can do as senator about policing in New York. But there is something she could do about America's exploding prison population. The Clinton administration could have done something but did not. Federal sentencing guidelines mandate minimum sentences for many offenses. Many drug offenses, including possession, carry mandatory terms. What does Hillary think about that? Juveniles are tried as adults. Does she think that is right? California's "three strikes" law, whereby a third felony conviction gets you a mandatory 25-year prison term, has been widely imitated. Should New York adopt it? America's mad rush to shovel more and more people into prison long preceded Giuliani. Since 1970 the number of people imprisoned in the United States has quadrupled; it has trebled over the last two decades and has continued at a steady clip during the Clinton era. Today, the U.S. imprisons more people than any other country in the world save perhaps Russia. The United States has 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of its prisoners.
The Bill Bennetts of this world rejoice. A large prison population, they claim, is a small price to pay for safe streets. However, it is not murderers and rapists who are filling up the cells. Most of the new inmates are nonviolent offenders. Of America's 2-million prison population, about 1.2 million (60 percent) comprise nonviolent offenders. Incidentally, one could easily eliminate all crime by locking up, say, a quarter of the population. At what point would Bennett admit that the policy had failed? When the prison population reaches four million? Five million? Ten?
As for Hillary, not only is she dishonest, she even gets her facts wrong about New York. Compared to other states, New York's record is pretty good: the crime rate here fell despite one of the slowest growing prison populations in the country. Between 1992 and 1997, the number of people behind bars in New York went up from 61,736 to 70,026. Violent crime, on the other hand, went down by 38.6 percent and the murder rate by 54.5 percent. During the same time, California's prison population grew by 30 percent while its violent crime rate went down a mere 23 percent, and the murder rate by 28 percent.
America's prison population is not likely to go down anytime soon. Prisons today are big business. There is a financial incentive to incarcerate ever greater numbers of offenders?too many people would stand to lose too much money if the prison gates swung open. Prisons provide employment to a vast correctional staff. In times of recession, when prison population tends to expand even faster than usual, they will soak up the unemployed. Plus, prisoners need to be fed, clothed, provided with plumbing and telephone services. Inmate telephone calls are estimated to generate more than $1 billion a year. A lot of companies' livelihoods depend on the prison system. A 1998 article in The Atlantic described something called a Corrections Yellow Pages that lists more than a thousand vendors. Among the items on sale were a "violent prisoner chair," made of belts and shackles attached to a metal frame, with special accessories for juveniles. There was also BOSS?a "body-orifice security scanner." Meanwhile corporations are busy constructing private prisons, which can be built faster than state prisons and are cheaper to operate. Private prisons generally use nonunion labor. Corrections staffs earn less than they would in the state sector, and receive fewer benefits and no pension.
Moreover, prisoners today are increasingly a source of cheap labor. A number of states permit private companies to use convict labor. For the corporations this makes excellent sense: they don't have to pay their prisoner-employees health insurance or unemployment insurance. They don't have to worry about vacations or sick leave. If a prisoner is sick, he is immediately replaced. If a prisoner is released the prison finds a substitute. There are no unions to worry about. As for the non-incarcerated workers, they will just have to work harder for less pay so as to remain "competitive." American workers already have to compete against African and Asian sweatshops. Now they have domestic sweatshops to worry about. Prison labor is the Wall Street Journal dream come true: a flexible labor market.
Hillary and her husband have happily presided over all of this. For the life of me, I cannot figure out why liberals like her so much.
Charles Glass The London Desk
Peachum Today A few years back, a beggar in the Portobello Road, the ragged and cheerful open-air market street near my house, used to ask me for "spare change." He was a fairly agreeable young guy. I never gave him much, usually a 50-pence or one-pound coin. We talked about the unimportant things that strangers discuss to avoid penetrating comfortable unfamiliarity. He was harmless, and begging was his way of making money. I sympathized more than usual then, because I'd given up a well-paid network job to be a freelance, i.e., impoverished, writer.
One evening, as I was walking up the wet street toward a food shop, he asked if I had any change. I said I had to change a £20 and would hit him on the way back. By the time I returned, he'd vanished. I was hoping he didn't think I was trying to stiff him when a car drove past quickly. Behind the wheel was the guy. I looked at him, and we both knew he'd had his last handout from this down-at-the-heels writer who could not afford a car for himself. I didn't and don't really care. Begging is, I suppose, just another job. If you make enough to buy a car, you're pretty good at it. Letting the donors find out is, however, a career error.
With that in mind, I've returned to London from a month in Israel and the U.S. to read about the latest British panic: "aggressive begging." ("Aggressive begging" is what I used to do at 4 in the morning in the flats of beautiful and recalcitrant young women.) The government is going after people begging for money in public, lest, I suppose, some august visitor like Bill Clinton notice them (as he would have in New Delhi, if the Indian government had not cleared them away). This country has not recovered from the "drug war." If it is as successful with beggars as it has been with drugs, you won't be able to walk in the Scottish highlands without having to fork over a few pence.
Our home secretary, Jack Straw, has launched a campaign that appeals to England's basest prejudices: hatred of the poor and of foreigners. He promised to speed up the processing of anyone convicted of "aggressive begging," that is, allow the courts to deport them quickly. Nowadays, it usually takes the government about 13 months (down from five years under the worst years of the Conservatives and the private company, Siemens, they hired to speed things up) to process a political asylum request. During this time, Britain's 102,000 asylum applicants are not allowed to earn money. And it is illegal for them to beg. "There is absolutely no reason for any asylum-seeker to be begging on the streets," a home office spokesman told journalists. "They are provided with enough to live on." How much? Well, about £25 ($39) in food vouchers and £10 ($15.57) cash per week. Pretty good, eh? I just spent £10 for a light breakfast.
The Murdoch press, genuflecting to the accuracy the 19th-century New York penny papers reserved for Irish immigrants, has portrayed the "aggressive beggars" as gypsies, and gypsies as, you guessed it, "aggressive beggars." (Most beggars in England are, in fact, defiantly English. Those of the upper classes who cadge money from Greek shipowners and Arab oil sheiks are rarely prosecuted, however aggressive their behavior.) The fleet command ship of Murdoch's empire, The Sun, asked its readers, "Are pensioners getting just a 75-pence-a-week raise because so much cash is being spent on refugees?" So, those damned refugees are responsible for the fact that poor Mother Macree cannot afford milk for her tea and old World War II veterans freeze to death in winter. Nothing to do with the fact that News International, which owns The Sun, pays no tax in this country. Nothing to do with the unfairness of the free market and the refusal of government to shift funds from those truly dependent on the state, like arms manufacturers and computer firms that keep tabs on refugees, to old folks, poor folks or any folks who forgot to donate money to the political parties. Yessirree, it's those Jews, I mean, gypsies. All their fault.
As with any truly damnable prejudice, the liberals have taken up the reactionaries' cry. A columnist in the soft-left Observer admitted to having been one of those "guilty liberals who gave money to beggars" until a Romanian woman attempted to clean her windscreen near London's Marble Arch. The traffic is so bad these days in London, she should have been grateful for the diversion. Like any good middle-class English hausfrau, the columnist shooed the window-cleaning refugee away. The Romanian "hitched up her dress and started masturbating with her sponge while yelling abuse." I'm afraid the woman should leave Marble Arch at once and ply her trade in Soho, where lonely men pay big money to women who will masturbate and swear at them. And it's legal.
Why are the government and press in full cry against these people? A New Labor "guru" named Philip Gould let slip that focus groups were worried about the refugees. They worry even about refugees from Kosovo, where Britain and the U.S. made such a mess that people flee here to be victimized by racists. And, with some pride, the government has just opened its first private internment camp for those awaiting decisions on their residence applications: good money for Group 4 Security, the company running it, if not for the refugees.
Last Wednesday, London's finest raided the houses of suspected race offenders and arrested a hundred of them for, in the words of the Daily Telegraph, "criminal damage, racial harassment, affray, robbery and sending racist material." London's 32 boroughs set up Community Safety Units last year, and Scotland Yard promised there would be "no hiding place" for those who spew racist cant. Good for them. Now, boys, get out your warrants and arrest Jack Straw.
Melik Kaylan The Spy
The Poonies For a while, I imagined that all Harvard Lampoonites either acted like the flamboyant nutters of Animal House, or wanted to. When I first saw the film, its hysterical-cool sensibility looked awfully familiar. I was just exiting out the barrel of a classical British education; we too behaved and thought that way. At boarding school, we'd grown up under the influence of Monty Python and its cultural epiphenomena. In fact, John Cleese was an alumnus of my school. The old wooden desk in divinity class featured an inscription: "I John Cleese hereby request that no one etch a single line, letter, or scratch, on the face of this desk because Mr. Hardiman says that should anyone do so, no matter who it is, I will be the one punished." It was signed and dated some 15 years before my time there.
We were loud and anarchic like the Animal House toga partisans?and brilliantly funny withal, I thought. In fact, I still think it. The high school and sophomore years produce the most unfettered pursuit of laughter in a life, and the purest codes of truth in humor. Imagine my surprise when I got over Stateside. "Sophomoric" was an insult, soon to be followed by "fratboy." Surely, I thought, everyone knows that "sophomoric" is a term invented by adult moralists and shareholders-in-power to stop the system from laughing to pieces.
Anyway, I came here and soon got to know a long list of Lampoonites, or "Poonies," over many years, chiefly from the Spy years. At first, they did seem very much like us over in England. Theirs was not a culture born, like jazz, out of hardship or suffering or, like rap, out of ghetto angst. It didn't apologize for not having minority or immigrant or "underdog" roots. Amazing for America, and probably a gift of the Reagan refulgence. Yet I detected that the Poonies differed from us, and from the Animal House side of anarchic American humor, in important ways.
First off, most Poonies I befriended were quiet-ish, often monosyllabic, deeply watchful. George Meyer for one?the chief sensibility behind The Simpsons and subject of a loving profile in the March 13 New Yorker. I only knew him sporadically through a mid-80s girlfriend who'd grown up alongside the Meyers in Tucson. I remember being astonished when Meyer left Saturday Night Live and moved to Colorado in 1987 (as also noted in the New Yorker article). He began to put out a sort of xeroxed publication called Army Man. I received one or two and it reminded me of our prep school efforts: scrawly cartoons, iffy layout, experimental gags. So far so good. But it came from a deeply inscrutable involuted vortex of American tv-culture introspection. A mind, as it said in The New Yorker, deeply influenced by MAD. Nothing wrong with that. But it wasn't a wide-open boulevardier humor engaged with the grand comedy humaine in bright ironic brilliance. The references circled darkly around entertainment-celebrity-adland, as if done by a lonely G.I. on a bunkbed with a pencil. This was clearly Meyer's year in the wilderness, a time of purgation and alienation from showbiz fraudulence. But where was the biblical timbre, the antidotal language of higher thoughts? Something, anything, in the vein of God and man or mortality, revolution and redemption. Instead, here was a mind using the mental furniture of pop culture to find a way out of pop culture purgatory.
And in this, too, I parted ways with the Poonies. They were the nation's intelligentsia. They might have led pop culture to higher ground. At Spy that mighty Ivy League army of extraordinary wits and obsessed month after month on celebrities, tv culture and the like. And to be fair, the results were without fail tremendously funny. In a Spy tv special, they did a laboratory test of regular citizens walking into a white room containing free coffee and donuts, a celebrity and an anonymous nobody. The camera looked down as if watching mice. It was exactly like a controlled experiment with the human groupings starkly displayed, and it was both funny and profound. And utterly trivial.
George Meyer's beautiful sister, a refreshingly outspoken and supercharged blonde, used to go out with Jim Downey, a writer/producer for Saturday Night Live and a onetime Poonie. Downey drove a decaying white convertible Cadillac. Downey too was laconic and soft-spoken, a little Keatsian in a haunted way, with an uncanny sensitivity to cliche but all in the context of media drivel. "The Tri-State area?I love that phrase," he once said while driving on a summer night. "The funniest I've heard it used was on a radio program about witches, you know, the healing holistic kind. They told us that in the Tri-State area alone there are at least 1500 registered witches."
Those of us who came out of the English system, who also mocked the fraudulence of trivial culture, could point to higher intellectual alternatives. Anything from John Donne to Graham Greene for example. But the Poonie code in general seemed wary of the highbrow.
Now I never blamed anyone for staying off politics, or religion for that matter. In the 80s we were all on the rebound from the 70s: political intellectuals were droning leftists, religious ideologues were equally disreputable. There was almost nowhere serious to go, even in a funny way. So "irony" was born, mocking trash culture while forever focusing on it. The dialogue in every new sitcom referred to other sitcoms. The Poonies, with Letterman et al., mired us in this Sartrean no-exit world. Result: These days all higher thought is dominated by cultural leftists and religious ideologues, these once peripheral forces now occupy the vacuum in the center. And the Poonies still don't talk much.