Reason Magazine - Staff

We're Here, We're Queer, And We're Perfect

info@reason.com (David Link) — Fri, 26 May 2006 09:23:00 EDT

Should California students learn that homosexual Californians have no flaws? A bill that just passed the state Senate could make that happen. Textbooks would have to treat lesbians and gay men with the same kid gloves the law now requires for members of other minorities. Equality demands many things, but not this.

The bill begins from a sound premise: that history classes should not be biased. California's schools went through a long period where students learned California and U.S. history without knowing about the contributions women or people of color had made to that progress. Up until 40 years ago, when the role of Native Americans, African-Americans, Latinos and others were brought up, they could be—and were—characterized in social studies classes in stereotypical and demeaning ways.

That's why, in 1965, California began the effort to make sure that our students' introduction to history was not also a course in Prejudice 101. If children are to learn repugnant stereotypes, they shouldn't get their information in school.

Much of the bias came from simple exclusion. Prejudice against certain groups made accomplishment much harder for them. But equality is a powerful motivator. As far back as 1913, the NAACP established its first branch in California. In 1918, four women were elected to the California Assembly. These, and many other documentable facts, were accomplishments precisely because they went against the overwhelming prejudices of their day. They are surely worth teaching to students. The rarity of such accomplishments, should not be used against them, and, in fact, demonstrates how steeply tilted the playing field was.

The 1965 changes to the Education Code served as a corrective, prohibiting biased curricula. But well-intentioned laws, like great civilizations, have their rise and fall. What began as an attempt to solve the problem of curriculum bias against minorities and women has evolved into its converse: a project to avoid anything that "reflects adversely" on them. That language is existing law. And whether related to lesbians and gay men, Latinos, women or anyone else, it is a license to whitewash.

Prejudice against Latinos should not cause Cesar Chavez to be left out of California history, but neither should it require that he be presented as a saint. Father Junipero Serra's shortcomings are part of his legacy, as are Leland Stanford's and Hiram Johnson's. Chavez should be treated no differently. Would it reflect adversely on women if Kathleen Brown's history-making run for Governor were described as a debacle? Possibly. But it's true.

These questions are hard enough when it's clear you are talking about a particular minority, but the discussion is even more complicated for homosexuality. It was not until the 1950s or so that American lesbians and gay men began to assert themselves publicly as homosexual. Remember, Oscar Wilde's famous trial for sodomy in England was premised on his defense that he was not a sodomite. Prior to 1950, it's extremely hard to know who was homosexual without resorting to exactly the sorts of stereotypes—rumors and gossip about bedmates, non-conforming gender behavior, cross-dressing—that the Education Code rightly condemns.

But for over a half century now, we have had people who comfortably identify themselves as gay. Moreover, it is now becoming clear that, whatever New York and San Francisco may think, the struggle for gay equality in this country had its genesis in California, and particularly in Los Angeles. Gay L.A., a major work of local history by Stuart Timmons and Lillian Federman, will be released later this year. It is the first book to fully document L.A.'s monumental contributions to the modern gay rights movement, and it will be a fine source for developing textbook material.

Knowing California's central role in the history of gay equality is one thing. But that's quite different from saying that students who learn the parts played by key figures like Harry Hay and Morris Kight should be prohibited from also knowing that those men could be a couple of very pissy queens. Should textbooks rely for their information about Hay and Kight or Harvey Milk solely from the gay community's hymnal?

Certainly, textbook authors should not go out of their way to find flaws. But neither should they have to avoid the obvious ones for the sake of not reflecting adversely upon someone's group. Even positive prejudice is still prejudice.

Many of the criticisms aimed at SB 1437 are due to the fact that it accepts the current statutory language as its starting point, and adds sexual orientation to the list. Sadly, the bill's author, Senator Sheila Kuehl, is being blamed for the existing law's excesses.

Minimizing bias is a respectable, even an essential goal for all education. That part of the law is important, and gays should be included in it. But steering textbooks away from "adverse" reflections on individuals because of race, gender, or any other group identity is a fool's errand, and bad history to boot.

Gay Rites

info@reason.com (David Link) — Mon, 01 Jan 1996 00:00:00 EST

On January 30, 1995, Evan Wolfson, a lawyer for the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, put the question to a room full of leaders of various grassroots lesbian and gay organizations in Los Angeles: What do we do about Hawaii?

Most people don't view Hawaii as any sort of problem, but that's about to change. The issue that has been lurking at the fringes of American public policy debate since the inception of the gay rights movement is now ready to take furious bloom, with its roots in the tropical paradise. Like it or not, Wolfson said, Hawaii is about to launch the country into a raging controversy over same-sex mar riage.

The only thing homosexual leaders can do, he told the crowd, is prepare for the pandemonium by getting all their arguments in order. By devising a campaign of public information and reasoned conviction, he suggested, lesbians and gay men can avoid the chaos they confronted when Bill Clinton pressed the issue of gays in the military before gay leaders had a chance to get their ducks in a row.

The stage is certainly set for this debate. In Baehr v. Lewin, the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that under the state constitution, it appeared that any denial of the right of same-sex couples to marry one another could not stand. Because the decision is not based on any federal constitutional rights, the Hawaii Supreme Court will have the final word in this case, with no appeal to or review by the U.S. Supreme Court possible. The court ultimately ordered a trial on the question of whether the state could show a compelling interest that would permit opposite-sex couples to marry while denying that right to same-sex couples.

Under well-settled law, a "compelling interest" must be more than just a good reasonit is the highest level of court scrutiny laws are subject to, and the most difficult for them to survive. That trial is now set for July 1996, and Wolfson is convinced, with good reason, that legal precedent indicates the state will lose. Dan Foley, his co-counsel in Hawaii, is equally certain of a trial court victory. Their efforts could make Hawaii the first state in the country to permit same-sex marriage.

On the other hand, little more than a week before Wolfson addressed the packed room in Los Angeles, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals ruled the opposite way. In Dean v. District of Columbia, the federal court said that a D.C. opposite-sexonly marriage ordinance did not violate any of the statutory or constitutional rights a same-sex couple asserted. Neither the Hawaii decision nor the D.C. one was easy: Each divided up three ways, with judges falling all over the ideological map. The D.C. decision ran to 57 pages, the Hawaii decision to just under 30.

Other cases that raise similar questions are already moving through the system nationally. The most compelling is in Georgia, where Robin Shahar, a deputy district attorney in Atlanta, was fired from her job after she had a religious ceremony blessing her same-sex union. A trial court ruled that under Georgia law that was sufficient evidence to fire her, and the case is currently on appeal.

Shahar's case is important because it illustrates how profoundly marriage intertwines legal and religious issues. Even conservative Christians might recognize in Shahar's lawsuit a straightforward punishment by the state for engaging in an exercise of religion. The ceremony she and her partner engaged in was purely religious, and did not involve the sort of civil marriage that is at issue in Hawaii and the District of Columbia. If you can get fired for having a marriage ceremony in your own church which your government finds distasteful, what other kinds of religious ceremonies might states want to punish people for?

No one really believes for a moment, though, that the Christian Coalition would rush to defend the religious rights of same-sex couples. Indeed, just the opposite is true. Shahar's case seems to have stymied most conservative leaders, while the Hawaii situation has put the religious right into an uproar, with the predictable fundraising appeals already in the mail. Pat Robertson's 7 00 Club is distributing a "fact sheet" which alerts its members that what's going on in Hawaii "forewarns the inevitable downfall of America."

Lesbians and gay men view Hawaii somewhat differently. If the plaintiffs win there in July, trips to Honolulu for gay marriages will become as much the rage as trips to Reno used to be for straight divorces. And the impact won't be limited to the Aloha state, either. The U.S. Constitution's Full Faith and Credit Clause requires states to recognize the judicial acts and proceedings of fellow states, and marriage has long been one of the core proceedings that is entitled to interjurisdictional acceptance. So a single state that recognizes same-sex marriages opens up the debate across the country. (Under certain limited and very rare circumstances, though, a state may refuse to recognize a marriage legal in another state. The Hawaii situation has prompted preemptive legislative efforts in Utah, Alaska, and South Dakota to deny legal recognition to out-of-state same-sex marriages with some successes.)

There's more: Nearly a thousand federal statutes use the term s pouse or marriage, usually deferring to state law on how those terms are defined. Unless those laws are changed, the federal government might find itself recognizing homosexual marriages and having to answer to the elector ate. Few Democrats and fewer Republicans could defend same-sex marriage without raising electoral eyebrows.

In one sense, the furor these cases will arouse is another manifestation of a debate that's been around for years. Fears of same-sex marriage were part of what made the national debate over the ERA so absurdly colorful two decades ago. Yet prior to 1994, only four reported court cases dealt head-on with same-sex marriagethree in the early '70s and one in 1984.

All dismissed the marriage claims briefly, using language similar to this 1973 decision out of Kentucky: "[M]arriage has always been considered as a union of a man and a woman....It appears
to us that appellants are prevented from marrying, not by the statutes of Kentucky or the refusal of the County Clerk... to issue them a license, but rather by their own incapability of entering into a marriage as that term is defined....In substance, the relationship proposed by the appellants does not authorize the issuance of a marriage license because what they propose is not a marriage."

The Hawaii Supreme Court found such arguments circular. Its plurality noted that the question comes down to competing definitions of marriage: Is marriage defined as the union of two persons, or is it the union of two persons of opposite sexes? If you think the second definition is the proper one, same-sex couples are making a frivolous claim because they are defying a definition as inalterable as the law of gravity. If you choose the first definition, however, same-sex couples may or may not be entitled to marry one another, depending on what you view as the underlying purposes of civil mar riage.

Same-sex couples contend that among the most important purposes of marriage is encourage ment of the mutual support, care, and affection that publicly committed partners make to one another, and that same-sex couples' commitments are as important to social stability and order as the commit ments of opposite-sex couples.

Jon Davidson of the Southern California ACLU argues forcefully that the bottom-line reason for treating marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution is usually found to be reproduction. Indeed, after the Supreme Court ruled in Baehr v. Lewin, the Hawaii legislature passed a non-binding resolution to reaffirm that its current law is "intended to foster and protect the propagation of the human race through male-female marriages." But there is no fertility requirement for getting a mar riage license, in Hawaii or anywhere else; states do not revoke the marriage licenses of heterosexual couples who do not, will not, or cannot reproduce. Nor is it true that homosexual couples can't qualify as reproducers, as legions of lesbian and gay parents can attest.

Thus, the best the state could argue is that Hawaii's "compelling" interest in keeping marriage an opposite-sexonly proposition is promoting the appearance of potential reproduction irrespective of actual reproduction. According to the bill, for example, marriage in Hawaii is only for those couples whose "genetic makeup suggest [sic] the possibility of offspring." Suggesting the possibility of offspring through genetic makeup seems to fall short of the target of fostering the propagation of the human race. And in a world that no one seriously argues is underpopulated, Hawaii's decision to take responsibility for the propagation of the entire planet's race, while ambitious, may not amount to an interest that can fairly be described as "compelling." After the state Supreme Court's divided but savvy decision in Baehr, it is highly unlikely such thin reasoning would survive review.

But it's still possible for the gay community to win in Hawaii and lose in the rest of the nation. Indeed, even a court victory in Hawaii could ultimately be short-lived. A poll of Hawaii residents taken several months after Baehr was decided showed that 67 percent actively opposed same-sex marriage. Such feelings are typical of the country as whole. A national Newsweek survey from last year found that 62 percent of adults oppose same-sex marriage, even though polls consistently show most Americans believe lesbians and gays should not suffer discrimination based on sexual orienta tion. If same-sex marriage ripens into an actuality, prompting the inevitable national furor, there is a good possibility that there would be sufficient votes in Hawaii and elsewhere to amend state constitu tions outright and to take other action that could cut back on even existing protections against sexual -orientation discrimination.

In Los Angeles, Evan Wolfson recognized that possibility. He notes, though, that there is a lot to be said for taking the principled position, even if it's a loser. Nothing galvanizes lesbians and gay men like a high-profile slap in the face. The Supreme Court's ill-reasoned and much-vilified decision upholding anti-sodomy laws in Bowers v. Hardwick remains, nearly a decade after its release, one of the principal rallying points for lesbians and gay men across the country.

Perhaps, then, the best lesbians and gay men can hope for is a brief interval of same-sex mar riage in Hawaii and the possibility of limited recognition in some other states. This may come at the cost of a national political debate that ought to make gays in the military look tame but will nonethe less raise everyone's consciousness, and some serious and openly anti-gay legislative efforts.

Instead of taking on such a potentially damaging crusade, suggests Los Angeles lawyer Thomas F. Coleman, gays and lesbians should pursue recognition of domestic partnerships in Hawaii, rather than full-blown same-sex marriage. Coleman is no enemy of same-sex couples. Indeed, he has spent over two decades working to secure the rights of unmarried partners, gay and straight alike. He devel oped and taught one of the first courses in the country (in the late '80s, at the University of Southern California Law Center) that explored the theoretical and legal basis for recognizing domestic partners.

But Coleman has always maintained a core pragmatism about the politics surrounding same-sex marriage. He believes that you have to have support at the grassroots level before a court decision will do you any good. He is fond of noting that, "You don't build the penthouse until you've constructed the first 19 floors." To Coleman, marriage is the penthouse issue in gay rights that will sit atop a building that isn't yet completed.

As a legal concept, domestic partnership is designed to address the gray area occupied by couples living together with mutual, permanent commitments to one another who, for whatever reasons (including the legal inability to get married), do not marry but nevertheless believe their relationships ought to be entitled to recognition, ranging from joint library card privileges and gym memberships to tax and health insurance advantages.

The dilemma facing domestic partners in general is particularly acute for homosexual couples. If marriage is defined to include only two people of opposite sex, lesbians and gay men must remain legally "single" for their whole life, even if they are in a relationship that is otherwise identical to a heterosexual marriage. Same-sex couples who have settled into a traditional domestic life may hold themselves out as partners to friends and family, take themselves off the dating merry-go-round, raise children together, go through religious commitment ceremonies, or exhibit any of a number of other characteristics that we associate with stable relationships. Legal recognition of the couple's commit ment is denied to them only because of sexual orientation.

Courts that have denied legal benefits to same-sex (and even some opposite sex) couples do so primarily based on an evidentiary concern. No matter how the couple feels about their relationship subjectively, how is a court to know, short of a legal marriage license, that the couple is truly like a marital community? As two legally single people, the couple could be nothing more than good friends, or roommates.

There are legally recognized ways to tell the difference between good friends and domestic partners, however. New York's highest court, for example, ruled that there can be plenty of objective evidence of an unmarried couple's mutual obligationsjoint bank accounts or insurance policies, wills, public and private acceptance of the couple as a coupleto support certain kinds of treatment equal to that accorded married couples. And many private employers with money on the line have managed
to find satisfactory ways for couples to demonstrate they're more than just good friends.

Coleman stresses that as the magnitude of the benefit increases, the assurance that the couple is truly committed must also increase. So, for example, permission from the library for two people to use the same card should require less formal evidence of commitment than an insurer might want in order to grant the family discount for health coverage. When there are high legal and economic consequences to recognition of the couple, Coleman requires that they sign a legally binding domestic partnership agreement, which, depending on its wording, may impose on the couple the same kinds of legal responsibilities to one another that marriage does, vis à vis such things as third-party creditors when one person takes on debt, or mutual obligations of support between the partners. And the couple must be fully aware that the agreement imposes such binding obligations.

At the January meeting in Los Angeles, Coleman laid out his case for holding off on legal challenges to same-sex marriage in order to pursue domestic partnership in the Hawaii legislature. While some lesbian and gay leaders are coming to view marriage as the core issue of the movement right now, he notes that most Americans don't quite comprehend why this is a problem, and some religious groups have gone off the deep end. The 70 0 Club, for instance, decries the oncoming " Hawaiian Tidal Wave" as "powerful enough to reconfigure the nation's social and political landscape."

State recognition of domestic partnership, says Coleman, would solve many of the problems while sidestepping the inevitable fracas surrounding same-sex marriage. Domestic partnership, un heard of only two decades ago, has taken unimaginable strides in acceptance. Over the past 15 years, domestic partnership has provided the source for
literally thousands of private businesses (including industry giants such as Apple Computer, Coors Brewing, Walt Disney Co., and Levi-Strauss), local governments, and other institutions across the country to recognize unmarried couples for purposes of a wide array of benefits and privileges.

As important, the Full Faith and Credit Clause issues raised by a Hawaii marriage license would be foreclosed for domestic partnerships entered into under Hawaii law. Nor would federal rights such as joint income tax returns and immigration lawsnecessarily be affected by a state-level domestic partnership law. (Congress could, of course,
accept domestic partnerships under federal law, but the chances are virtually nil right now.)

No one believes domestic partnership is a separate-but-equal form of marriageit is clearly legally inferior to marriage. But the differences that make domestic partnership subordinate also serve as a political strength. Hawaii is a special case because it's the first time domestic partnership is actually available as the compromise position. Domestic partnership, which has been proposed but not accepted in several states, has always been viewed as too radical. Hawaii, though, has to consider an even more radical concept, and the choice between same-sex marriage and domestic partnership makes the latter much easier to accept. In fact, one reason the Hawaii trial was set for July 1996 is that Gov. Ben Cayetano appointed a commission to study the legal viability of domestic partnership. Some hope that if the Hawaii legislature recognizes same-sex couples through domestic partnership, the issue of same-sex marriage will be defused.

While domestic partnership may present itself as a workable political compromise, it's not clear whether it would pass a judicial compelling interest test. The decision in Baehr v. Lewin split along a 212 vote, and there have been personnel changes since the ruling. Given Baehr, the court can essentially rule one of two ways. First, it can rule that Hawaii's exclusion of same-sex marriage is indeed a violation of the Equal Protection Clause, but a justified one (similar logic was used in the Bakke decision with respect to affirmative action). Second, it can say anything short of allowing same-sex mar riage is illegal.

Whatever the judicial shakeout, it's undeniable that domestic partnership would grant same-sex couples access to a variety of benefits from which they are currently excluded. The plaintiffs' brief in Baehr v. Lewin, for example, listed about 65 different benefits under state law that the plaintiffs were being denied, from the right to sue for a partner's wrongful death to lower hunting license fees. A state-recognized domestic partnership statute could grant every one of those benefits.

In other words, Hawaii's recognition of domestic partnership would be a classic example of federalism, of the much-vaunted "laboratory of the states." Because it need not necessarily be recog nized by any other state and because it does not provide any automatic challenge to existing federal laws, domestic partnership would not compel another national debate over gay rights in a context that's an almost sure loser for lesbians and gay men. If Hawaii wants to recognize relationships that South Carolina wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole, why should South Carolina or Washington, D.C., care?

Domestic partnership, argues Coleman, can move the country forward incrementally, avoiding all the drama. It is a very strong possibility in Hawaii right now, if only because legislators are look ing for any route that will avoid a constitutional showdown over marriage.

An additional advantage of a domestic partnership statute, says Coleman, is not so obvious: Court decisions protecting rights are, or ought to be, a last resort. Constitutional protection of rights, whether state or federal, is never entirely independent of political winds. This country is not without examples of court-recognized rights that set politics into turmoil, and whatever else we can expect from the 1996 elections, candidates stumping in favor of gay marriages are unlikely.

In that atmosphere, a legislative determination that same-sex couples are entitled to certain benefits is a political victory of incredible magnitude precisely because it comes from the majoritarian legislature rather than from the minority-protecting courts. And it is momentous because it moves the debate beyond the recognition of individual lesbians and gay menwhose rights are legally protected as individuals in a number of states to focus on their relationships, and does so through the democratic process. Those are powerful factors to consider.

In contrast, Evan Wolfson's trust in the power of a strong public education campaign about same-sex marriage requires a commitment from a widely diverse gay community that it is not always able to muster. Suspicion about same-sex marriage is not in short supply, particularly among the most left-leaning lesbians, who criticize all marriage as a patriarchal nightmare, and among the usual band of libertine suspects to whom settling down is a fate worse than death. Meanwhile, some high-profile gays, such as author Bruce Bawer, The New Republic 's Andrew Sullivan, and the Cato Institute's David Boaz have argued that legal recognition of same-sex relationships is a conservative proposition, one that reinforces traditional American values. Anong some gay activists, that is viewed as selling out.

And, so far at least, the public education campaign about gay marriage has suffered from solip sism. In an August 28 press release on the Internet's Same-Sex Marriage homepage, Lambda touted the success of its marriage resolution, which says that states should not discriminate against same-sex couples who want to get married. But of the 23 groups who had signed on, more than half had "gay" and/or "lesbian" in the title; the rest were either well-known gay rights organizations such as Lambda, the Human Rights Campaign Fund, Dignity, and the Log Cabin Republicans, or else staunch liberal groups such as NOW and the ACLU.

Simply put, if an education campaign is going to do any good at all, it's going to have to educate people who aren't already up to speed. It's easier to teach algebra to a physics professor than to a seventh grader. Getting a group of lesbian and gay Latinos to sign on to the marriage resolution is not going to do much in the way of persuading heterosexuals in Cleveland that same-sex marriage is a good idea.

To be effective, any public education campaign will have to do more than reiterate Bill Clinton's advice to lesbians and gay men during the debate over the military. Get out there and tell your stories, he said. Let people see what you've been going through, feel your pain. That'll convince 'em. But the failure of that strategy during the military debate had nothing to do with a lack of good personal stories. From Perry Watkins to Grethe Cammermeyer to Joe Steffan, the gay community brought out its best and its brightest to illustrate the case. Randy Shilts wrote a whole book of the most compelling stories imaginable, and the result was "don't ask, don't tell."

Such a strategy seriously misconstrues the nature of education. Education -- at least in a political context -- isn't something you give to people, it's an argument you make -- and it involves very hard work. Stories, even the best personal ones, don't do the trick. You can't just entertain people -- you have to change their minds.

Wolfson is adamant that this is not a fight he has chosen -- it is one that had chosen him, and all he can do is prepare for it as best he can. But Coleman saysy there are ways to avoid a national debate over same-sex marriage, and good reasons to wait, even if only for a year or two. Domestic partnership is not the kind of "compromise" that don't-ask-don't-tell is. It provides concrete benefits (about five dozen of them in Hawaii) to committed couples who are entitled to them, and it sidesteps a host of extremely difficult problems. And a domestic partnership law in Hawaii in no way forecloses the possibility of same-sex marriage -- after continued debate. That debate is an inevitable as it is necessary.

Coleman figures that public support for gay marriage is a good 10 years off. Regardless of the accuracy of this estimate, he appears to be on the mark in believing that recognizing domestic partnerships can keep the political temperature down for a while and give heterosexuals of good will a chance to get used to the idea of lesbians and gay men, not just as individuals, but as couples.

The question of what to do about Hawaii lands the gay community once again square in the middle of a dilemma that's as old as politics itself: the conflict between principles and pragmatism. As with most other qyestions, the positions are not mutually exclusive. Wolfson's principle is not utterly rash. Coleman's pragmatism doesn't lack principle. But with a trial pending, this is the first time when some resolution of the legal rights of same-sex couples unavoidable.

Babylon Sister

info@reason.com (David Link) — Wed, 01 Feb 1995 00:00:00 EST

Vamps and Tramps, by Camille Paglia, New York: Vintage Books, 532 pages, $15.00

A sign on the street in Hollywood warns of construction ahead: "Vermont Ave. congested between 3rd St. and Hollywood Blvd. Seek alternate routes." That last phrase nicely sums up Camille Paglia's writing. Academics, like their poor relations in the increasingly incestuous media, are not immune from the general instinct to travel in packs. That instinct has led to some serious congestion in contemporary thought.

Paglia has sought to find a way around the herd. And like those drivers in Hollywood who are now seeking alternate routes, her new paths are not the easiest or most convenient; some are very bumpy indeed. But a girl's got to get where she's going....

Vamps & Tramps is Paglia's latest collection of essays, her second sop (after Sex, Art and American Culture) to those of us who have been waiting sleeplessly for the last half of Sexual Personae to be released. For the uninitiated, Sexual Personae is Paglia's magnum opus, the first part of which surveyed sexual imagery in art from the beginning of time up to Emily Dickinson. Its prickly contrarian energy, flashes of brilliance, and unrelenting wit made Paglia a star. The second half, still being updated, will show how movies, television, sports, and rock music continue to reveal the same recurring themes --that paganism's rich, sexual texture can't be kept down in our nominally Judeo-Christian culture. Jerusalem never conquered Babylon--Christianity and paganism are in eternal tension.

A book by Paglia is a lot like sex itself: When it's good, it's very, very good. And when it's bad, it's still pretty good. Vamps & Tramps is a step above pretty good, a medley of Paglia's writings, musings, and doings since Sex, Art and American Culture was released in 1992, consisting of essays, book reviews, transcripts of films and interviews, cartoons about Paglia, and an index of media references to her, with suitably withering editorial comments for those who unfairly malign our heroine. If these last two seem more than a trifle self-serving, well, Paglia has no problem with megalomania, hers in particular.

The book's title comes from the female personae Paglia sees missing from contemporary feminism: seductresses with "vampiric power over men," women who know how to make men helpless. It's not that these personae are missing from the culture--they can be found in such powerhouse movies as Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction, they're scattered everywhere throughout music videos and country/western songs. People can't get enough of the trial of O.J. Simpson precisely because they need to find out if Nicole had O.J. so utterly in her thrall that he murdered her and Ron Goldman in an impotent rage. An accomplished athlete, a beautiful brute of a man, helpless in the face of his feelings for his ex-wife: Now that's female power.

But feminism doesn't know how to account for men who feel they're under women's spell because of feminism's consuming focus on women as victims. Paglia sees social victimization as only part of the picture. Raw nature--sex--has to be accounted for, too. And it is women's sexual power that Paglia sees in action again and again. Female power, not female victimization, captivates our attention. Paglia's analysis of why the Amy Fisher saga warranted three TV movies is typically pithy. That story wasn't about Joey Buttafuoco at all. It was about the women: "When long-haired Amy, spoiled only child, mall chick and part-time call-girl, mounted the Buttafuoco porch with a pistol in her pocket, every power play in the history of love was on red alert. It was high noon on a Tennessee Williams veranda....Amy vs. Mary Jo Buttafuoco on the porch was a trash tango, a clash of the female titans."

The same forces of nature make pornography eternal: "What feminists denounce as woman's humiliating total accessibility in porn is actually her elevation to high priestess of a pagan paradise garden....Modern middle-class women cannot bear the thought that their hard-won professional achievements can be outweighed in an instant by a young hussy flashing a little tits and ass. But the gods have given her power."

It annoys Paglia when feminists deny women's sexual power, since any idiot can see it everywhere. The problem is that feminist academics ignore what's right in front of their eyes. Paglia pays as much attention to tabloids and TV movies as she does to Homer, Wordsworth, and (one of her special favorites) Spenser. She sees a continuity in the great themes regardless of the context. And unlike just about any other feminist academic, Paglia doesn't have a sentimental bone in her body to distract her from the truth.

On the whole, Vamps & Tramps is a carnival. We see Paglia here in all her guises, from the highly serious to the completely loopy. She shines in her analysis of the competing personae of Bill Clinton and Hillary, suggesting that Hillary's persona is probably more suited to being commander-in-chief than Bill's. After that, Paglia is on to a film with drag queen Glennda Orgasm ("Glennda and Camille Do Downtown") in which the two of them encounter a group of dour-faced feminists, Women Against Pornography. It is a moment of sheer comic perfection that comes through even in the transcript. The comedy is matched a little later by Paglia's advice for the lovelorn columns from Spy magazine. Self-described as a "short, fast-talking comedienne with dimples, who imitates Keith Richards to avoid looking like Sally Field," Paglia dispenses her wisdom like Dear Abby on speed.

In fact, her prose is consistently among the most colorful and effective today. No one in the chattering classes can match her when it comes to the punishing reproach. Andrea Dworkin, one of Paglia's demons, "has turned a garish history of mental instability into feminist grand opera." Even Paglia's praise comes with barbs attached. One essay is titled, "Kind of a Bitch: Why I Like Hillary Clinton."

But Vamps & Tramps shows a personal side of Paglia that I don't recall having seen before, and it's a welcome departure. In a lengthy essay on four of the gay men who have been central to her life, Paglia writes with deep respect and affection about friends who have touched her thinking and being in important ways. For once, the writing is not self-centered. In giving the spotlight to others, Paglia demonstrates a grace and generosity few might suspect her of. Similarly, underneath the tirades against academic corruption, we see Paglia's fury is animated by a genuine concern for students, whose struggles with the classics she understands. She wants them to wrestle with the big books as she did, unhampered by the political preconceptions that litter academia. Her lectures end with a mantra for students that stands out as uncharacteristically sweet and hopeful in Paglia's otherwise bitchy writings: "Hate dogma. Love learning. Love art."

The meat of Vamps & Tramps is an essay titled, "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality," which serves as a good overview of Paglia's controversial politics. In the sexual arena, Paglia argues, "sexual conduct cannot and must not be legislated from above...all intrusion by authority figures into sex is totalitarian." In the absence of physical violence, sex is a force of nature, and legal tinkering is as effective as making gravity a punishable offense.

Her criticism of abortion laws is typical. She refuses to get bogged down in the nit-picking over when life begins. Accept that it begins at conception, she says, and that abortion is killing. To Paglia, it's a primal form of self-defense. To the woman involved, such killing is, or should
be, ethically troubling. But government, which guarantees freedom of religion, has no right to interfere with a woman's personal argument against nature. "Under the carnal constitution that precedes social citizenship, women have the right to bear arms. The battlefield is internal, and it belongs to us."

This probably won't get very far as a political argument in what is now the most sentimental nation in history, but it's exemplary of Paglia's straightforward style. She demolishes the "hostile workplace" theory of sexual harassment, noting that "every workplace is hostile... head-on crashes are the rule." Innovation comes from competition, aggression, opposition--it is those qualities that keep corporations, and personalities, from becoming stagnant. By trying to protect themselves from sexually explicit (or implicit) speech, women lose out by keeping themselves disengaged from the surging poetry of rough language: "Middle-class white women have got to get over their superiority complex and learn to talk trash with the rest of the human race." Paglia's models are strong, tough-talking women who knew how to answer cheeky men: her two Italian grandmothers, Rosalind Russell, Tallulah Bankhead. You have to willfully ignore massive parts of the culture to suggest women's role models in the 20th century are confined to the Debbie Reynolds/Doris Day school of blonde, perky submission. Why do women think they can't be like Katharine Hepburn?

When she moves into her major sub-theme of homosexuality, however, Paglia seems to get tangled in her own reasoning. She begins by saying, "Homosexuality may be the key to understanding the whole of human sexuality." There is some important truth here. Opposing ideas enlighten one another, test limits and theses you can't examine in a vacuum. One of the reasons we cling so firmly to the view that gay men are "them" is that it so conveniently distances us from uncomfortable notions about our own sexuality we'd just as soon not face. For example, Paglia shows how the "bacchanalia" gay men in New York and San Francisco went through in the '70s helps illustrate how the absence of women affects male sexuality irrespective of sexual orientation. While a lot of people use that example to prove how uncontrollably promiscuous gay men are, viewing gay men as men reveals deep aspects of men's sexuality that we can't see in heterosexual relationships by definition.

As in the rest of her writing, Paglia has no patience for sentimental arguments about homosexuality. In the context of procreation, Paglia argues that homosexuality is every bit as unnatural as the religious right says it is. But while accepting Biblical proscriptions against homosexuality for this reason, she aptly dismantles the right's objections with the observation that we not only have a right to defy nature, but that the greatest glories of civilization, even civilization itself, are monumentally unnatural. We defy nature all the time, and point to our accomplishments with pride, from the Pieta to the Panama Canal, from Antigone to Fred Astaire.

Paglia views homosexuality as a supreme form of natural defiance, and thus civilization. She points out that "gay male consciousness, as I have experienced it, is stunningly expansive and exquisitely precise. Gay men have collectively achieved a fusion of intellect, emotion, and artistic sensibility." It is from such observations that she suggests a biological connection between homosexuality and art: "Men are not born gay, they are born with an artistic gene, which may or may not lead to an artistic career. More often, they are connoisseurs, aesthetes, or simply arch, imperious commentators with stringent judgments about everything."

I wish. As a highly opinionated gay man, I guess I have always aspired to being an arch, imperious commentator, and I suspect most people would love to believe they fuse intellect, emotion, and artistic sensibility. Unfortunately, as anyone who has ever been to a gay rodeo knows, more than a few of us gay men have a rather clunky sense of aesthetics. I don't want to trade anecdotes, but only to suggest that sometimes Paglia lets metaphor leak over into stereotype, with some rather dire results.

As we learned during the gays-in-the- military debate, homosexuality still packs a wallop as an idea. Paglia's triumph has been in locating the idea of homosexuality within the broader context of all sexuality in art and culture. But few of us view our lives in the structured terms of art. Paglia's focus, though, is limited to sex as indicative of something bigger than itself, sex as topos. That literary approach, based on Paglia's reading of Freud, diminishes reality and even diminishes Freud, who recognized that sometimes you can smoke a cigar and not have to think about your mother. Paglia, who rejects nihilism, won't bear the thought that life can't always be shaped and ordered into meaning.

This makes for a real gap between the grand theories about lives and the measly details of conducting a life, and leaves a lot of people baffled. If gay men can't procreate and don't happen to have the wit and style of Noel Coward, they're pretty much useless as metaphors in Paglia's universe, and their defiance of nature leads to nothing. How do you account for all those homosexual farmers and shop owners and assembly-line workers Neil Miller has written about?

The limitations of Paglia's analysis show up most colorfully in her objection to lesbians who use dildos. If dildos are so pleasurable, she posits, why not go on to real penises? If a person's sexual life is simply pleasure-oriented, the conclusion is pretty obvious. But the argument breaks down if you include motives beyond sex. When you move on to real penises, there's generally a man attached to the other end. If you believe, even if you're being a sentimental fool, that sex and other aspects of life are connected, complications arise in the real penis scenario that don't appear in the dildo scheme. Examining the story as an archetype leads to a grand explanation that satisfies intellectually, but when the story is part of someone's real life, different considerations come into play, some of them pretty prosaic.

The danger is that what may be true intuitively, or even statistically, will not be true in individual cases, and the individual case might take exception to being swept into a theory that doesn't include him. In holding gay men responsible for AIDS because of what happened in the '70s and early '80s, Paglia leaves out the vast numbers of gay men who were not in San Francisco and New York during those years, and the many who were but had no personal taste for the goings-on of the smart set. Even accepting the lowest numbers about who is really homosexual, nowhere near a majority of gay men are infected with HIV. The theme of natural defiance and consequent punishment is one thing as a metaphor, but it's something else again when you use it against an ordinary guy in Topeka who got it into his head that he could live his life authentically and not have to pretend he was attracted to women, but who wouldn't know amyl nitrate from Emile Zola. There is nothing worse than being held responsible for lives you are not leading, errors you have not made, failures you are trying to avoid. Anyone who has ever objected to prejudice is saying no more than that.

Paglia is not prejudiced by any means, and critics who make such a charge are willfully misreading her work. But her complete dismissal of all social constructionist arguments leads to that misreading. For example, she believes law cannot affect the prejudice many heterosexuals feel about homosexuals and gays should just accept this. But, that idea breaks down in the face of Paglia's broader and better argument that to some extent we pay attention to cultural cues, sometimes in defiance of our most fundamental natural instincts. Sometimes we can learn better. Murder is a primal urge, something even the most civilized of us might feel moved toward now and then. But we have learned how to resist the temptation, and are better for the resistance. That's what civilization is, "a defense against nature's power."

There is no reason to abandon hope that heterosexuals can resist prejudice, and every reason to believe the contrary. The point of great art is to teach empathy, illustrate the variations and the possibilities, walk us through points of view not our own. And the point of government is to try to move art's best lessons into practice, to enforce against nature what civilization it can. Accepting a little social constructionism (it's not an all-or-nothing affair) means that prejudice isn't something we have to live with, any more than murder.

As Paglia says, defying nature may be the most glorious thing about human beings. It's a little unfair of her to imply that, in this area at least, heterosexuals are civilization-impaired.

Storyville

info@reason.com (David Link) — Sun, 01 Jan 1995 00:00:00 EST

"On February 23, 1994 at approximately 1:00 a.m., Bruce Edwin Callins will be executed by the State of Texas. Intravenous tubes attached to his arms will carry the instrument of death, a toxic fluid designed specifically for the purpose of killing human beings. The witnesses, standing a few feet away, will behold Callins, no longer a defendent, an appellant, or a petitioner, but a man, strapped to a gurney, and seconds away from extinction. Within days, or perhaps hours, the memory of Callins will begin to fade. The wheels of justice will churn again, and somewhere, another jury or another judge will have the unenviable task of determining whether some human being is to live or die."

--Justice Harry Blackmun, in Callins v. Collins, No. 93-7054, cert. denied, February 22, 1994

"Justice Blackmun begins his statement by describing with poignancy the death of a convicted murderer by lethal injection. He chooses, as the case in which to make that statement, one of the less brutal of the murders that regularly come before us--the murder of a man ripped by a bullet suddenly and unexpectedly, with no opportunity to prepare himself and his affairs, and left to bleed to death on the floor of a tavern. The death-by-injection which Justice Blackmun describes looks pretty desirable next to that. It looks even better next to some of the other cases currently before us which Justice Blackmun did not select as the vehicle for his announcement that the death penalty is always unconstitutional--for example, the case of the 11-year-old girl raped by four men and then killed by stuffing her panties down her throat....How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection compared with that!"
--Justice Antonin Scalia

Most people are familiar with the stand-up comic's rejoinder when a dog outside the club begins howling: "Everybody's a critic." In the exchange quoted above, Justices Blackmun and Scalia reveal a slight alteration to this quip, one that is among the most significant changes culture has undergone in the last half of the 20th century: These days, everybody's a playwright.

But the plays that everyone is writing are not fiction, or not formally fiction. Justices Blackmun and Scalia are not making anything up in their deadly serious debate. Rather, they are telling the truth, but telling it with a particular style, the dramatic style that fiction makers have long used. Like playwrights, both justices are ordering and honing highly emotional details into a pattern they find satisfying. But unlike playwrights, they are arguing public policy using the lives of very real people.

There is certainly precedent for using stories in public discussion, from the hair-raising tales that prompted the Salem witch trials through Uncle Tom's Cabin. But today, this kind of hyperdramatizing is just about the only way we can conduct our debate about public issues. And we have adopted the dramatic style so thoroughly that we don't recognize it as a style, one among many in which public debate may be conducted. News, both on television and in print, is increasingly driven by dramatic anecdotes full of personal pathos and anguish, righteous justice, and deepest concern. What information there is in modern news is secondary to grand tragedy, fear, social paranoia, tender sympathy, whimsy, lust, and madness.

That is not to suggest that drama does not exist in real life. Bruce Callins was a very real person, and the state of Texas's method of carrying out its death penalty is far from imaginary. Justice Blackmun is just stating real, verifiable facts. But so is Justice Scalia, who accurately relates Callins's crime and the brutal and pitiless rape and murder of that young girl. Each justice's skill at telling the story he finds most convincing demonstrates what becomes of information in the dramatic style. A necessary byproduct of drama, and sometimes its entire purpose, is to influence the way facts are seen. Drama may be used to color facts, and sometimes obscure them. But as we let the pleasure we get from storytelling overshadow what is significant about particular facts, it becomes harder and harder to arrive at a reasonable interpretation of information.

Look what happens to the facts in Callins v. Collins. Justices Blackmun and Scalia are engaged in an argument over something tremendously important: the morality and propriety of the death penalty. But their debate devolves into trading images of anguish and torment. That emotionalism is the centerpiece of the dramatic style. The justices are wrestling with the practical effects of philosophy as it works itself out in public policy, but as the focus turns emotional and personal, philosophy and public policy fade into the distance. We begin to care about (and are meant to care about) the people whose stories are being described.

Once Justice Blackmun invokes the suffering of Bruce Callins, Justice Scalia has to respond in kind. Drama can only be answered by drama. Sufficiently pathetic imagery is like steroids in sports--once one competitor indulges, competition becomes meaningless unless all competitors join in. Scalia cannot adequately answer Blackmun's highly specific imagery simply by referring to the more dispassionate kinds of logic Supreme Court opinions normally utilize: such arguments as the Constitution's apparent acceptance of the death penalty, the reasonably clear intent of the Constitution's drafters, and public opinion polls that show a large majority of Americans continue to support that ultimate punishment. Logic is not where the argument is any more. Blackmun moves the argument away from abstractions and into the arena of the personal, the individual, the pathetic. Scalia can respond only on those terms.

In this case, as in most, the drama is in the details: Each justice summons highly specific facts he believes support the intellectual argument he finds convincing and leaves out or minimizes others. Blackmun's opening would do well in a movie, with its insistently precise focus. ("On February 23, 1994 at approximately 1:00 a.m., Bruce Edwin Callins will be executed by the State of Texas...") Then, like any competent dramatist, he tweaks our sympathy, in this case narrating the way Callins will be erased from memory while the machine grinds on. ("Within days, or perhaps hours, the memory of Callins will begin to fade. The wheels of justice will churn again, and somewhere, another jury or another judge will have the unenviable task of determining whether some human being is to live or die.") Any fiction writer will recognize that this is good dramatic composition.

Scalia's command of dramatic style is no less astute. He gives us the details at the other end of a crime--provoking us with verbs and adverbs loaded with passion ("ripped by a bullet suddenly and unexpectedly") and facts guaranteed to evoke compassion (the image of the dead man, left bleeding to death on the floor of that tavern). Further, Scalia's use of understatement is a nicely chosen device to heighten the dramatic effect. ("He chooses, as the case in which to make that statement, one of the less brutal of the murders that regularly come before us.")

The facts in Callins v. Collins are not particularly unusual in their drama. Just about all cases that make it into the courts involve human injury, conflicting opinions and passions, heated disputes; and the drama is usually most intense in criminal cases. Movies and plays have long exploited the drama inherent in a trial.

Further, the Constitution itself requires a story. No federal court can decide a legal matter unless there is a case or controversy--an actual situation in which some injury has occurred to an identifiable person, or, at the very least, is immediately imminent. Federal courts (and many state courts) cannot issue advisory opinions that merely examine the law as a generalized prospect. Legal issues must be decided based on a given set of facts. Thus, before a court engages in legal analysis, it will most often begin by reciting those facts--the story.

But the Constitution does not require a dramatic story. Callins v. Collins illustrates how the dramatic style becomes something of an end in itself, heightening passions but resolving nothing. Compare the following statement of the facts, which more fairly represents the way a court deals with the facts of a case, to the ones Justices Blackmun and Scalia wrote. It is from Brown v. Board of Education (which consolidated several individual cases), reversing Plessy v. Ferguson:

"In each of the cases, minors of the Negro race, through their legal representatives, seek the aid of the courts in obtaining admission to the public schools of their community on a nonsegregated basis. In each instance, they have been denied admission to schools attended by white children under laws requiring or permitting segregation according to race. This segregation was alleged to deprive the plaintiffs of the equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment. In each of the cases, other than the Delaware case, a three-judge federal district court denied relief to the plaintiffs on the so-called 'separate but equal' doctrine announced by this Court in Plessy v. Ferguson."

This statement of the facts is conspicuously devoid of the suffering the law inflicted on the main characters. The tone is distanced, passive, legalistic. There is no adverbial assistance, no invoking of the human plight the individual victims of such laws endured. The point of view is that of the dispassionate Court.

It is not at all hard to imagine a far more dramatic recitation of the facts. Brown, in fact, has been criticized for its reliance on sociological materials about the psychological effects of segregation on black children. But it is a world apart from the dramatic narratives in Callins. The psychological studies show up in Brown, but the children are still only abstractions. A modern judge could easily have found room to recount some of the details that the 1954 Court subsumed into the phrase, "they have been denied admission to schools attended by white children."

We live in an age that is supersaturated with specifics, with pathos, with drama. We are now entering the second full generation that has grown to adulthood with television's relentless storytelling as its context. We are exposed to more dramas every day than any culture in history, and that familiarity has now become an expectation. We aren't just used to drama, we seldom pay attention to anything else.

But the expectation of drama makes public debate much more difficult. Our craving for stories, our perception of ourselves as audience members, undermines our ability to carry out the far more important function that we all have as democratic decision makers. As citizens who have been given a say in making our own political destiny, we need to know the facts about the issues we and our elected representatives have to decide. But the facts we need--the big picture, the statistical patterns, the relevant general principles, the hard data--are deeply buried in the dramatic stories we crave. The problem is not that we can't separate facts from fiction, the problem is we can't separate facts from drama. And it's hard to get facts these days in any other way.

"If only it had happened somewhere else, in some other country, and we'd just read about it in the papers, one could discuss it quietly, examine the question from all points of view and come to an objective conclusion....But when you're involved yourself, when you suddenly find yourself up against the brutal facts you can't help feeling directly concerned--the shock is too violent for you to stay cool and detached."

--Eugene Ionesco, Rhinoceros

In Quentin Tarantino's film, Reservoir Dogs, one of the characters, a cop, goes undercover to infiltrate a jewelry store robbery some hoods are planning. To pull off the ruse, the cop is coached by an undercover pal to tell a tale from his fabricated life, called the "Commode Story," to help convince the caper's mastermind that he is really a criminal. The cop's coach reinforces the importance of being specific--it is details that matter. The cop rehearses the story over and over, perfecting his performance, going over the minutiae.

Then, in a restaurant, we see him begin telling the tale to the people he is supposed to reassure. His audience is skeptical at first, but they listen. He draws them in as he relates the background of the drug sale, and his sudden need to go to the bathroom which sets the Commode Story in motion. Unknown to him, he relates, four cops and a drug-sniffing police dog are hanging out in the head. When he gets to this complication, the cop's audience, nodding in sympathy, is fully engaged in the story. They know what it's like.

As the undercover cop reaches the part in the story where he enters the bathroom, Tarantino cuts away from the restaurant where the story is being told, and places us in the very scene the cop is relating. Suddenly, we are in the bathroom, where the cops are prattling away; there is the police dog, a beautiful German Shepherd. The undercover cop, who in the story characterizes himself as a run-of-the-mill drug peddler, enters and freezes as he sees the dog. The dog begins barking. Tarantino then cuts back and forth between the cop telling the tale, and the tale the cop is telling.

It's a daring scene in an even more daring movie, but what is so fascinating about it is that it's about the whole process of telling dramatic stories. The undercover cop is manipulating reality to achieve a specific end, and, even as observers, we get caught up in the manipulation. When we first get into the bathroom, there is absolutely no doubt about whose point of view we are there with--a criminal's. That empathetic response is the power of drama--it alters our point of view and expands our picture of the world.

As this century draws to its close, we tell each other more stories--and as a result have more opportunities to view the world through eyes other than our own--than any other culture in history. On any given day, television alone gives us access to many hundreds of stories, either completely enacted (as in movies or fictional television shows), emerging (television news), or some combination (TV news magazines, daytime talk shows, soap operas). And that does not take into account newspapers, magazines, movies, comic books, plays, the ever-increasing events that amass into history, radio dramas, or the gossip we trade at work. The stock of stories available to nearly every one of us has spiraled into almost uncountable numbers.

Our lives are haunted or charmed, depending on your point of view, by old episodes of I Love Lucy and Hill Street Blues and The Twilight Zone, the brooding tragedy of The Godfather, and the whimsy of Tootsie. Every day, the news presses us with the immediacy and inflated importance of its reports, and even when we know we're being conned, we play along because we love the rush of a story. Television is more full of Bearded Ladies and Two-Headed Babies than any circus sideshow ever was: the Zsa Zsa Gabor cop-slapping spectacle; the day Phil Donahue wore a dress, or the guy threw the chair on Geraldo; O.J. Simpson, Tonya and Nancy, Lorena Bobbitt, Heidi Fleiss, Michael Jackson, Lyle and Erik Menendez.

But there is this difference from a circus sideshow: Today we want more than just a peek at the freak--we want to know what the life of a Bearded Lady is like, what the parents of a Two-Headed Baby were feeling when they learned the news. Our constant immersion in the sea of stories has accustomed us to the idea that everyone's point of view counts. Our desire to know the story is one part voyeurism, one part escapism, one part genuine human sympathy, but the result is reshaping us in some important ways. Nancy Kerrigan's pain, as she shouted out, "Why me?" is now part of our national consciousness. We collectively felt her pain, saw the world through her eyes. That fact has consequences.

"Faith slips--and laughs, and rallies--
Blushes, if any see--
Plucks at a twig of Evidence--
And asks a Vane, the way--
Much Gesture, from the pulpit--
Strong Hallelujahs roll--
Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul--"
--Emily Dickinson

The dramatic style gets its vitality from the most brutal fact imaginable in a society that believes in science--the fact that certainty is impossible. Dating back to Aristotle and Plato, Western societies have had an obsession with objective reality and a correlative concern with subjectivity. But specifically since Newton, we have become mad about answers, about certainty, about science. Legal systems, theories of psychology, religions, child-rearing guides, and even artistic doctrines have been devised on "scientific" principles. Ambiguity and uncertainty are the enemy of such systems, guesswork the foe to be conquered. Absolute certitude and predictability are seen as achievable goals.

In the face of human diversity and natural mystery, we have a desperate need to know for sure. This is nowhere more visible than in the law. Virtually every society has a justice system designed to settle unsettled questions, to move us toward a satisfying certainty: Who is responsible for a murder? Who is at fault in an auto accident? Which party in a contract dispute can be held financially liable?

Heightening, then resolving, that uncertainty is one of the hallmarks of drama. In the Los Angeles Times, theater critic Laurie Winer posed this rhetorical question: "If we knew for certain that O.J. Simpson was guilty, would we still hang on to every expression?" It was, in fact, the uncertainty of what was happening in the back seat of the Ford Bronco that transformed an otherwise completely undramatic event into a world-class piece of theatre. While news reporters breathlessly characterized the pursuit up Interstate 5 as a "chase," what was really going on was following, not chasing. One reporter said O.J. was "fleeing," but at about 45 miles per hour on an empty L.A. freeway, he was being driven home with a police escort, not dashing for the border.

What was dramatic about the "chase" was the possibility that Simpson might do something inside the Bronco. All we could see from the helicopter shots was the Bronco's roof, with a few tantalizing glimpses inside the front seat. What was going on in the back? What had gone on in the back? Was he even still alive? Those questions provided the dramatic uncertainty, not the pursuit itself. People were glued to their sets because they wanted to find out how it would end--what would be revealed when the Bronco finally arrived home?

Uncertainty isn't enough to create a satisfying drama, however. We also expect, in the real world as in dramatic fiction, resolution--a climax and denouement. The longing for finality, for resolution in an ambiguous world, for an end, is one of the reasons we go to the incredible expense of having public trials. The public felt cheated when Michael Jackson privately settled the civil charges of child molestation he was faced with. What did the settlement mean? That he was guilty? Innocent but unwilling to go through the public meat grinder a trial would almost certainly have been for the famously reclusive singer? Jackson's settlement deprived us of that final judgment.

Indeed, we are willing to pay an extravagant price for finality. When the juries in the first criminal trial of Lyle and Erik Menendez could not reach a verdict after the months-long trial had ended, L.A.'s district attorney announced with unmistakable firmness that irrespective of the cost, he would mount a retrial, attempt once again to bring the case to a public conclusion. It was not the facts of the murder that were in dispute, but the ultimate question of the boys' guilt or innocence that we wanted finally decided.

Yet even a jury verdict cannot provide certainty. While few jurors have read Ludwig Wittgenstein, every one of them knows by heart his conclusion in the masterful essay, "On Certainty." Certainty is based not on facts, but on our intuition about facts. "Sure evidence," Wittgenstein writes, "is what we accept as sure, it is evidence that we go by in acting surely, acting without any doubt." Because there is always a residue of doubt about the facts, jurors are asked only to determine whether a criminal defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, not whether he is guilty without any doubt at all.

But as Justice Blackmun noted in Callins v. Collins, some doubts are not obvious. It is those doubts that nag. In other contexts, it might be possible to live with some uncertainty, but when the penalty is death, is any doubt acceptable? The problem is that doubts are always possible. Certainty, if viewed mathematically, is a target like the one Zeno's famous arrow could never reach.

It is that tiny area of uncertainty that the dramatic style exploits. The epidemiological studies may show that breast implants have no relation to connective-tissue disease, for instance. But confronted with a real woman who is really suffering, what reporter will favor the cold statistics? What jury? Facing this reality, breast implant makers threw up their hands at the futile prospect of besting drama with science in court, and settled lawsuits against them for more than $4 billion. As Wittgenstein argued, facts may speak loudly, but they do not really speak for themselves. Even within science, and certainly outside it, analysis is infected by intuition, by subjective beliefs about what facts matter, and about how they matter. Human beliefs can be pushed around, manipulated.

The significance of even the most stable facts can be heightened or undermined by their context. And that is what a trial is about--letting opposing sides orchestrate and fashion facts into one or another point of view. Look at two simple facts. At Nicole Simpson's condominium, police found a bloody glove. At O.J.'s mansion a few minutes away, Detective Mark Fuhrman reported that he found another bloody glove that appears to be a match. At O.J.'s preliminary hearing, these two facts were put into the context of other facts (the oddly parked Bronco, initial blood typing, etc.) to establish a suspicion that O.J. Simpson had been at both sites, and thus could have committed the murders.

But in the weeks following the preliminary hearing, O.J.'s defense put those two incontroverted facts into a very different context, one which supported a conclusion directly contrary to the prosecution's. In his notorious article in The New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin reported that the defense was planning to rely on other undisputed facts, including an internal police department claim by Fuhrman for early retirement, to show he was racist. In that supercharged context, the defense would argue, the two facts look very different. Fuhrman could have discovered two bloody gloves at Nicole's and secreted one which he then planted at O.J.'s to get revenge on a rich and popular black man.

Both stories leave something out. The prosecution's story ignores, or at least minimizes, Fuhrman's on-the-record racist statements. The defense theory downplays Fuhrman's distinguished career after the retirement claim was denied. The defense also has to deny or minimize the obvious fact that perhaps more than a dozen officers were at Nicole's prior to Fuhrman's arrival, none of whom noticed two gloves rather than one.

A lawyer's tools are those of any storyteller: Lawyers appeal to human emotion, try to summon great motivators like injustice, sympathy, pity, terror, even (sometimes) prejudice. Lawyers take the raw material of facts, and by carefully selecting and constructing them, build them into a dramatic story that will sway a jury to see things their client's way. Their job is to assemble the story that best represents their client's version of events, to look at the facts the way their client views them, even if that means engaging in a certain conscious myopia.

But during a trial, law acknowledges the power drama has over facts by placing constraints on the storytelling ability of advocates. Lawyers must tell their client's story within the confines of due process and the rules of evidence to ensure that the jury will decide the case based on relevant and material facts. Lawyers are given wide leeway, but some facts are excluded from the jury's consideration because their contribution to one side's story, while emotionally powerful, may stray too far from legal relevance or plain reliability. It is the loss of this control that Judge Lance Ito is so concerned about in O.J. Simpson's case. Unlike lawyers, the media are not restrained by the constitutional and evidentiary boundaries that apply inside the courtroom and can report any version of the story that strikes their fancy, even the most unsubstantiated and inflammatory hints or rumors.

That problem is heightened in the court of public opinion. As in the media coverage of the Simpson trial, there are no rules of evidence, no canons of due process when we debate issues that make it onto the public agenda. As Jonathan Rauch has most persuasively argued in his book Kindly Inquisitors, the First Amendment is, and must be, pretty much an anything goes proposition. That means arguments about public issues may be unfair, irrational, feeble, deceptive, or even outright lies. Whatever works, as political consultants now so coolly shrug. One good emotional depth charge, one compelling story, can explode any sense of objective reality and send public policy spinning out of control.

"I can't support this scientifically, but I know it anecdotally..."

-- Daniel Schorr

To merely invoke the name of Polly Klaas is to call her tragic story to mind, the kidnapping out of her own bedroom, and later, her merciless murder. What happened to Polly Klaas was inhuman by any standard. What her family suffered, no family should have to endure.

But while there is certainly reason to sympathize with Polly's family for their loss, this tragic episode is a decisive illustration of how stories obscure real facts. Intensely personal stories are perhaps the most effective way we have to make facts irrelevant. Every injustice happens one person at a time, even if that one person is completely atypical.

Because of the highly emotional nature of the crime, and because of the media's relentless attention, this one kidnapping and murder came to stand for Crime. While the statistics showed that the crime rate in certain, isolated categories (mostly crimes committed by young people) was higher than in previous years, on the whole crime was down--particularly the kind of violent crime that occurred in the Klaas case.

Despite the statistics, the Polly Klaas drama drove public policy. Because of its intense emotionality, it expanded beyond its own borders. It became everybody's problem, though what the specific problem was was a little vague at first. When the problem was finally defined as "murderers get out on parole," a solution could be devised ("three strikes and you're out" legislation) and enacted. All because of a story.

But at exactly the moment that "three strikes and you're out" became the party no legislator wanted to miss, a contrary story was unfolding in the press. In Singapore, 18-year-old Michael Fay was caught spray painting cars and was sentenced to receive six strokes across the bare buttocks with a wet rattan cane, later reduced in a political compromise to four.

While on its face Fay's story does not have the life-and-death emotional appeal of Polly Klaas's, the media found it equally compelling and tried to whip up a similar sense of terrible injustice. The case became an international incident. Although the American public was generally unsympathetic to Fay, the media resolutely focused on the caning, presenting it as something just short of the death penalty. Every television news organization had footage of a martial arts expert whacking the hell out of something, footage accompanied by voiceover narration about how canings slice the skin, draw blood, lead to fainting. We looked at the massacred object before us and were implored to imagine the beautiful young Fay's suffering, St. Michael of the Cane. Fay would be scarred for life, it was urged, both physically and emotionally. The caning would forever haunt him. How could the government of Singapore do such a thing? It was just a small infraction, after all. Why should the boy's punishment be so cruel?

As we know now, Fay survived the brutality and lived to profit from it. What is important here, though, is that in both the Fay story and the Klaas incident, news organizations had no allegiance to neutral facts; their loyalty in both cases was to drama.

Think about the stories the media did not tell, but could have. The Fay story could easily have been presented within the Klaas framework: If punishment is severe enough, it will deter future crime. In fact, that appears to be the framework in which most Americans saw the story. It would have been harder to present the Klaas story within the Fay framework (let's have a little sympathy for the defendant), but that story is not unheard of, as the Menendez brothers know very well.

Within the opposite story's framework, however, neither story would have sufficient capacity to stir up emotions. Presenting the Fay caning as an appropriate punishment lacks drama. Suffering has more emotional appeal than a single, quick act of well-deserved discipline. Similarly, sympathy for the defendant in the Klaas case was a little hard to muster; as a story, it was much more effective if you focused on Polly as the lead character.

Dramatic stories obscure facts and broader contexts by concentrating on a single point of view. That focus displaces other aspects of the story. In reporting the tale of Holly Ramona, who believes she recovered long-dormant memories of child abuse by her father when she was a young girl, the Los Angeles Times Magazine made this remarkable statement: "Father-daughter incest, once believed a rarity, is now said to occur in 1% to 2% of households." As the absolute number of human beings increases, words like rarity lose all meaning. Holly's story, like every story, is its own statistic; every story counts, and must be acted on. Something that happens 1 percent of the time is now more than rare, it demands our attention as a nation. And while there is no doubt of the gravity of incest, our national resources are now demanded for hundreds of thousands of things that happen 1 percent of the time, because the stories are so compelling.

Sure the cost of separating Siamese twins joined at the heart is astronomical, but how can you deny those children (or at least one of them) a chance at life? Can you put a value on a human being? Damn the cost, save that child. And maybe it is true universal health care would mean more people would live healthier lives on the whole. But does that really mean you'll have to have a rule that the life of an 80-year-old heart attack patient is valued less than the life of a 14-year-old boy with a kidney problem? Look in the face of the 80-year-old. Who makes the decision
that someone's grandmother has to die? When we view facts as nothing more than the building blocks of drama, our focus is so close on the characters whose story those facts affect that it's easy to forget anything outside them.

"Life. What a beautiful choice."
--Anti-abortion TV ad

"Every life is a story waiting to be told."
--Ad campaign for the Los Angeles Times

There is no better example of the way the dramatic style now suffuses all of American society than the single example of abortion. The issue of abortion was established fully within the dramatic style sometime in the '70s, and it has flourished ever since as the most dramatic and polarized public-policy debate in modern America. While other issues such as race and sexual orientation have been similarly hyperdramatized, abortion adds a unique dimension that makes it the front runner in the drama derby--it involves the most explicit and interesting example of actual playwriting.

State laws concerning abortion date back to the beginning of this country, but the modern debate about abortion began when women first asserted that the decision whether or not to bear a child was included within the Constitution's right to privacy. The legal and constitutional argument is about government power over the individual and the specific point at which states may control personal decisions. This strictly legal argument has played itself out in a number of factual arenas, from searches and seizures in criminal cases to laws governing specific kinds of speech.

But while the underlying issue was a legal one, advocates challenging state abortion laws framed the debate in more dramatic terms. What was at stake was "women's lives." The image of a coat hanger, symbol of the thousands and thousands of dangerous back-alley abortions, became the centerpiece of the pro-choice argument. Women who had undergone such humiliating and life-threatening procedures came forward to tell their personal stories. Details filled the air.

As in Callins v. Collins, those stories were not false. Women had suffered during illegal abortions, and women had senselessly died. And all to assert an important aspect of human autonomy--the ability to make a choice about a highly personal, intimate, and life-changing decision.

By answering the laws in these dramatic terms, women were using a powerful tool to persuade the public and the courts. And at least as far as public opinion goes, perhaps no other kind of argument would have been as effective. The questions of governmental power and individual dignity are complex and often difficult to comprehend. Stories about women's pain and suffering strike at the heart; pity moves. But by using that singular weapon so prominently, abortion rights advocates also changed the nature of the debate. Abortion opponents could not answer such arguments with strictly legal ones. Once one side uses drama, the other side is obliged to respond in kind.

Therefore, the debate surrounding Roe v. Wade became one pitting women's lives against the lives of fetuses. Again, at least as the courts framed the issue, the vocabulary was from the Constitution. But it was the images of pity and terror that stirred everyone up, not the 14th Amendment and citations of Griswold v. Connecticut. As we all know, in the battle between women and fetuses, fetuses lost: a KO in the first trimester, and a partial but pretty clear upset in the second.

But Roe did not end the debate. And what kept abortion alive as an issue was the unconditionally dramatic terms in which the debate was now cast. Far from accepting Roe as a defeat, anti-abortion activists viewed the decision as a challenge. If abortion rights advocates could win the battle on dramatic terms, anti-abortionists would up the emotional ante and try to seize their victory in the war. In the years following Roe, fetuses were not just defined as human beings entitled to all the rights and privileges of the law, they were described as human beings, referred to as human beings, and finally depicted as human beings. Commercials, videos, ads showed how much a fetus looks like a baby. They called our attention to little toes and tiny fingers, movement, brainwaves, and the little guy's beating heart.

Roe was not overturned, and so the emotional ammunition went nuclear. Some pro-choice candidates found themselves having to answer ads showing footage of abortions, the bloody parts and remains of actual aborted fetuses. Objects claimed to be the end result of such abortions were bottled and displayed like the fragments of unholy saints, or attractions in the abortion sideshow to the circus of American politics. Clinic blockaders hooked arms and crawled like children, praying with all the conviction only true believers can muster, and crying, crying real tears for all the murdered babies.

To many on the pro-choice side these tactics seemed unfair, but anti-abortion activists were doing no more than pro-choice advocates had done--they were making their appeal dramatically. Whatever legal issues had once provided the foundation for the abortion debate were now nearly invisible. All that was left was drama.

But the anti-abortion argument deploys a wondrous variation on the self-dramatization pro-choice women relied on. Women who had suffered through illegal abortions were always telling the stories they had experienced, the central conceit of the dramatic style. But those who oppose abortion have no story with which to start, no self to dramatize. They are not, after all, telling their own stories but are appealing to our compassion for someone who as yet has no voice. But just defining a fetus as "potential life" isn't enough for the dramatic style to work. There has to be an actual story to dramatize.

A fetus's suffering can be implied from the pieces that remain in the aftermath of an abortion. But that image presents suffering without a story attached. The details are lacking. After a quick, horrific image, there's not much drama to fill an argument's sails the way a good back-alley abortion will.

But there is a way to get around this almost definitional problem--appeal to stories that actually do exist. Extrapolate from "potential life" to the visible lives of real children. Every fetus becomes not just a fetus, but your child. Look in your child's eyes. Look in this fetus's eyes. Could you kill your child? How, then, could you let someone else kill hers?

This is an almost quintessential act of playwriting, and its creative brilliance is breathtaking. People who have no story to tell, but who must exist in the world of dramatic style where a story is the only currency accepted or appropriate, invent a small life story through an appeal to empathy, and then posit that the story is being ended, even though in reality it has never begun. Suddenly, the images of fetus parts disappeared from the debate and were replaced by children on swings, wide-eyed little girls and energetic little boys, and the nicest narrator in the world intoning, "Life. What a beautiful choice."

The point is not so much to demonstrate the emotional manipulation of these advertisements as to show how fully we have accepted the dramatic style as a style. The dramatic style is the argument. To the extent the beautiful choice ads are intended to influence public policy, they are emblematic of the necessity in the modern world of conducting public policy debate in drama's terms. If you don't have a story, invent one, or stage one, or buy one from somebody. But you can't be heard until you have a story to tell, until you've proved you can tug at heartstrings.

"So often we simply must see their faces, hear their voices, in order to really be convinced of the truth of what we are being told--and so often we do not because the reporter has failed us as a storyteller. He has not been sensitive to what readers like, to those high-interest elements that separate a good story--or story idea--from a tedious, unengaging one."

--William E. Blundell in The Art and Craft of Feature Writing

Personal stories are not the only basis on which politics can be conducted. Personal stories are illustrations, but they fit into a bigger picture--an analytical framework, a statistical pattern, a social context, a philosophical point. Isolated from such broader contexts, personal stories can be entertaining but can lead away from reason, not toward it; every story has a counterstory somewhere. Every woman skulking down a back alley has a counterpart, a child somewhere on a swing. Every man about to be executed has a mother, but he also has a victim, who also has a mother. And every single story is only one, one among a multitude that could be told. The black guy who didn't get the job because of unfair prejudice has a story to tell, but so does the white guy across town who's unemployed because of an affirmative action policy, not because he wasn't qualified. Jesse Helms and Jesse Jackson both know how effectively stories work in the public world.

The problem boils down to a terrible irony--when public debate relies on the empathy engendered by stories, our compassion can be used to paralyze us. The reason we do not use the death penalty more than we do is not "legal technicalities," or too many liberal judges, or laws that are exceedingly lax. The reason we do not execute more people is that we are frozen in place by compassion when it comes down to the wire. The possibility that we might execute the wrong man is the most horrific story imaginable. While acknowledging its statistical improbability, Justice Blackmun said in Callins v. Collins that even the rare possibility of being party to such a story was too much for him.

When Justice Blackmun announced his retirement from the Supreme Court, it was his compassion as a judge that was most often mentioned, not only his compassion for women in Roe v. Wade, or for criminal defendants who might have been convicted wrongfully, but compassion for minorities of all kinds. But compassion for one party is often hostility to someone else. In public debate, compassion is a fiction maker's trick without a fiction maker's control over context. Compassion for welfare mothers is good, but where is the compassion for taxpayers whose obligations are continually on the rise? In the dramatic style, one person's story will ultimately count for more than someone else's, which must be rejected. What does his compassion for women say about Justice Blackmun's compassion for potential children?

Drama gives us pleasure, but as it moves out of fiction into the real world, it carries greater and greater dangers. By focusing public debate on hurt feelings, we almost guarantee we will hurt someone's feelings--the person whose feelings are not being focused on. Public policy cannot focus everywhere at once. And when it tries, we get contradictory policies--attempts, for instance, to cut taxes, increase entitlements, and balance the federal budget all at once.

I don't know if there's any way back from the dramatic style. It arises from too many factors that are inevitable aspects of both human nature and the technological world--the eternal appeal of stories, the pervasiveness of the greatest storytelling medium in history, our inherent desire to be compassionate and caring, the certainty of human conflict. There is no way our news organizations will give up the greatest audience attraction they have at their disposal, and as increasingly factionalized interest groups continue to benefit from the attention and success of pathos and pity, they, too, will hang tough with what works.

But as we grasp at every available theory to explain baffling phenomena of our times, such as why an increasing number of juries are failing to convict criminal defendants (particularly in high profile cases), it may be worthwhile to consider this one: that the most lavishly compensated defense lawyers have seen the changes in our culture affecting the priorities we all have. Judgment and empathy are in eternal conflict, but in recent years empathy has gained a considerable edge because of our extravagant exposure to drama, our intimate familiarity with other points of view. It takes less and less effort to exploit that reality in a courtroom. And courtrooms are only one among a hundred places where we let our compassion tip the scales and then wonder why things turned out the way they did.

Back in the 1940s, a catalog of classes at the University of Southern California law school listed "Rhetoric" as a mandatory course. Today, you would be hard pressed to find a class in rhetoric at any school. But we live in the most rhetorically complex society in history. The dramatic style is one of the most powerful persuasive devices imaginable, and it has become the most common way we debate public issues. Unfortunately, it produces an inevitable downward spiral--drama can only be answered by more and better drama.

But the dramatic style can be recognized as a style, as a rhetorical device that uses facts for its own purposes, that openly manipulates an ambiguous reality, that exploits compassion. The tools for discerning and analyzing drama as a style are fundamental, not only for lawyers, but for anyone who participates in democracy. Yet we do not teach students this--that what is best about us, our compassion and our empathy, can be and frequently is used against us. Until we learn to cull what meager information we are given these days out of the dramatic context within which it's presented, we will continue to be a nation bewitched, bothered, and bewildered by the storytellers who surround us on all sides.

Facts About Fiction

info@reason.com (David Link) — Tue, 01 Mar 1994 00:00:00 EST

As the debate over violence on television plods forward, TV's critics seem to have achieved a decided advantage--they have virtually no opposition. Everybody decries TV violence. Nobody even plays devil's advocate. Some people have tangentially answered the critics by bringing up the First Amendment and censorship. But that's as far as it's gone. No one defends violence on television. And when Americans all line up on one side of an issue, you know something is terribly, terribly wrong.

I write fiction. While the focus of my dramatic writing has been theater and movies, like most Americans I watch television. And I think television violence can and should be defended. The problem isn't that people pay too much attention to the violence that appears on television; the problem is they pay too little.

To begin, this is a debate about fiction. We are far too much in love with the real-life violence on television to want to do anything about it. Televised football, boxing, and hockey not only depict violence, they have physical conflict as their primary purpose. And real-life violence dominates TV news: Murder, robbery, drive-by shootings, fires, death, injury accidents on the freeway--all are guaranteed their place on the news whenever they occur, and the more horrendous the circumstances, the more heated the coverage. Whether or not the news actually shows the bullet pass through the body, as occurred earlier this year when the Telemundo network's cameras captured a man murdering his ex-wife at a cemetery, is irrelevant. The thing that draws us to these stories time after time is the fact of violence, violence's explicit or implicit presence. When Phil or Oprah or 60 Minutes or PrimeTime Live tells us about Lorena Bobbitt cutting off her husband's genitals, we lean a little closer to the set and toy with the images being conjured.

This is not necessarily bad. It is hard to argue that we shouldn't know or talk about the real violence that occurs in society, its causes, and its consequences. And the drawing power of violent sports speaks for itself. That leaves only fictional violence as the target of this debate. It's much easier to maintain that fiction writers, who by definition make things up, should make up less that includes the depiction of violence.

But what is it everyone's getting so exercised about? Of all the popular dramatic forms, television is by far the least violent. It is not just top-rated comedies like Roseanne, Home Improvement, Seinfeld, or Coach that lack violence. Even the hour-long dramas are more like Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman or Northern Exposure than The Terminator. Even Murder, She Wrote, L.A. Law, and Matlock--which purport to be about criminal behavior--involve no more blood than a cozy Agatha Christie novel. The only violence in television drama is found in the few remaining cop shows, such as NYPD Blue, and in movies, whether or not made for television. On the whole, television today is less violent than it has been in more than a quarter of a century.

Television is the subject of the current controversy not because it is the most violent medium but because it is the most vulnerable. In 1978, the Supreme Court held in FCC v. Pacifica Foundation that broadcast media that come into the home are not entitled to the same First Amendment protection other art forms enjoy. While the reasoning in that case has undergone some serious erosion in recent years (and, in the thinking of some, wasn't too steady to begin with), it remains the vehicle that Attorney General Janet Reno and others ride in their crusade. And it is a vehicle that is seriously overloaded.

The problem is that we assume televised, fictional violence is the same as the implicit or explicit violence that is the subject of nonfiction news. But there is a critical difference between the two. When television journalists report the latest carjacking or the murder of a 6-year-old, the report is singular, disjointed, one report among others that bear no relation to one another except that for that day someone has decided that they constitute "news." Even on a magazine show such as 20/20, stories can be given only 10 or 12 minutes of air time, not enough to tell them in a fully developed context. Compare this to fiction, where every event, including every act of violence, is presented as part of a whole story. There is a beginning to the story, a middle to it, and an end.

That fact, almost always left out of this debate, has consequences. When we see a complete story, we are given the material to make judgments about the characters and their actions. Every story has some message, every writer has an intention, and most reasonable fiction writers expect their audiences to make judgments. While such judgments are possible with nonfiction, we also know that a news report is not complete, that the news crew could only capture a certain amount of the story's context for presentation in a restricted forum with next to no time for elaboration.

In the debate over television violence, too many people are ripping fictional acts of violence from the context their stories provide, as though viewers were watching those acts as isolated incidents on the 6 o'clock news. A recent ad by the American Family Association laments that by the time a child has finished elementary school, he or she will have witnessed 8,000 murders and more than 100,000 acts of violence on television. These figures appear to indicate that a lot of fictional acts of violence have appeared on television, at least in the past. (Or that the definition of "act of violence" is so broad it is almost meaningless, but that's another argument.) What the figures leave out is the context in which those acts occurred.

Consider the argument, brought out like a trusty musket, that fiction too often "glorifies" violence. The truth is that it does not. On television in particular, the overwhelming number of violent acts are committed by someone clearly identifiable as an antagonist. In cases where a protagonist engages in violence, that violence is either legitimized by justice or righteousness, or it is a necessary response to a violent provocation. In every one of those three situations--antagonist violence; protagonist violence to accomplish justice; or protagonist violence in defense of self or others, and to which there is no reasonable alternative--the act falls well short of "glorification."

It is hard even in motion pictures and theater to find examples in which violence is glorified. The touchstone is probably Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. In that film, the most brutal violence is accompanied by seductive, humorous, or lush music; it is choreographed like a ballet. More important, when the state removes the violent impulses of Alex, the main character, the audience is lured into rooting for the procedure to fail. At the end, when it does fail, there is a sense of relief that Alex has returned to normal.

This turns conventional morality about violence upside-down, the very point of the film. For purposes of the present debate, though, A Clockwork Orange illustrates an attitude toward violence that is so rare as to be almost non-existent, especially on television. Television violence is nearly always presented in the conventional moral framework. When an antagonist commits an act of violence, it is clear that it is wrong. When a protagonist commits an act of violence, it is either morally good, because it accomplishes justice, or it is morally questionable, regrettable but, as a defensive act, necessary to preserve some greater good. There are no Alexes on television.

Even on Beavis and Butt-head, any fair reading is that their violent acts are committed by vacuous losers, Dead-End Kids for the '90s, and in that context violence is not "glorified" or intended to be a model for behavior. Beavis and Butt-head may be violent, but they are also terminally bored, Samuel Beckett meets Hanna-Barbera. Boredom is their entire context. Compare Beavis and Butt-head to The Itchy & Scratchy Show, which occasionally appears on The Simpsons. Itchy & Scratchy is a macabre, ghastly look at the way we used to present violence to children, but its violence is so far over the top that it is impossible to miss the satire. Beavis and Butt-head don't revel in their violence the way Itchy and Scratchy do; they don't revel in anything. That's the point. While Beavis and Butt-head involves a more attenuated morality than the obvious satire of Itchy & Scratchy, if viewers see any of these characters as role models, they are thoroughly misreading the shows.

Even in the movies shown on television, conventional attitudes about violence predominate. There are a number of movies that are over-full of violence; teen slasher movies and martial arts films are the most obvious examples. But far more often than not, movies do not stray too far from the conventional moral framework that condemns rather than exalts any act of violence. Movies that do violate the expected moral framework about violence, or that come close to the line (Bad Lieutenant), will generally not make it to television.

A good example of the violence that does make it to television is the 1987 feature film, Predator, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was recently shown on a Sunday afternoon, a time when young children would likely be watching. By any measure, there is a tremendous amount of violence in this film, in which Schwarzenegger is called for duty to rescue a VIP whose plane has gone down in a hostile jungle and winds up having to fend off one of the most disagreeable aliens ever to hit the screen.

While there is far more violence in Predator than in A Clockwork Orange, Schwarzenegger's film puts violence in a context that cannot be missed. That context, shared with most violent films, is a question: What is the response to the violence in the world? Schwarzenegger's Dutch uses violence reluctantly; he even chastises his co-star, Carl Weathers, who in one scene is too eager to confront violence with violence. But at film's end, it is Dutch against the alien, only one of them will survive, and only the most intentionally perverse viewer would root for the alien. Dutch hews to a reasonably clear moral line about violence, using it either when it will accomplish justice (the script's inciting incident is an attempt to rescue innocent people who went down in the plane and are being held hostage) or ultimately for self- preservation. In the world the movie presents, Dutch or others would die if he were not violent. People living in South-Central L.A. might understand that world view; Korean grocers do.

Some movies do focus obsessively and crassly on violence. And some of these movies make it to TV, or at least cable. Predator could have been made with fewer explosions, less blood, less explicitness. But it is here that the argument against violence on television breaks down most seriously. No one can deny that young children or even turbulent adolescents or vulnerable adults might stumble on such a movie and become transfixed. The question is, Why? The American Family Association is right that over the years we can see thousands and thousands of individual acts of violence on television. But anyone who sees a televised movie that exploits violence and who then decides violence is "cool" has to reject the thousands up-on thousands of hours of television's moral lessons to the contrary, has to be entirely immune to the context in which cautious producers present even excessive violence time after time after time.

Even the strongest emotional argument used by violence's critics loses its force if context is seriously considered. Assuming that too many children are raised by parents who do not teach them a clear rejection of violence, what forces would cause even the most vulnerable viewers to reject the repeated message from television that violence is at best a necessary but questionable solution, but is more often outright wrong? The power of violence must be so overwhelming that moral lessons to the contrary are irrelevant.

And maybe that's true. Anyone with any historical perspective knows that violence appears to be an eternal theme, from Homer and the Bible right up to Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. Despite millennia of moral teachings to the contrary, some people are going to murder, rape, mutilate, and torture others, and there seems to be no certain way to predict who will, or to prevent them from doing so. But violence continues to be a story--both on the news and in drama--because it is unusual, something the vast majority of people do not engage in.

The drawing power of violence is not television's fault, any more than it is the Bible's. Anyone who has actually read the Bible is well aware of the grisly, explicit, and hideous scenes of violence that are sometimes recounted there, acts even the crassest producer would never dream of presenting on television. Yet the Bible is known for its moral teachings, while television's moral teachings about violence, which are wholly consistent with much of the Bible, are viewed as nonexistent, no matter how often and regularly they are repeated. Those people who engage in violent acts in real life have ignored what they have seen on television, not given it too much credence.

What politicians and activists are now demanding from fiction is something law and religion have been unable to accomplish in centuries of trying: moral instruction that people will uniformly follow. While moral condemnations of art go back for centuries, the stakes have now grown because of the pervasiveness of television. In the present debate, Janet Reno has given dark but unmistakable hints that if artists don't voluntarily do something to stop this "national epidemic of violence," Washington will have to step in. In this Reno follows Plato, who long ago concluded: "Both poets and prose-writers tell bad tales about men in most important matters; they say that many unjust men are happy and many just men wretched, that injustice is profitable if it escapes notice, that justice is another's good and one's own punishment. I think we will forbid these tales and order them to compose the opposite kind of poetry and tell the opposite kind of tales."

Two premises underlie this desire to regulate art. First is the assumption that audiences are incapable of serious reflection and will mindlessly imitate what is presented to them. Second is that they will imitate good actions only when no bad actions are presented to the contrary. These assumptions may be an appropriate way to deal with young children. As some recent studies have confirmed, the sappy happiness of the purple dinosaur Barney, while cloying to many adults, provides very young children with a needed center. But such premises make no sense when dealing with adults.

And particularly when television is concerned, there is no rational way to separate adult audiences from younger audiences. There is no way to ensure that all parents will have their young children in bed by 9 or 10 p.m., and since children might be exposed to television accidentally at any given moment (and a moment is all it takes, at least the way this debate is shaping up), television must be wiped clean of all violence, of any bad action someone might imitate. There's no telling which child will be the one to imitate some fleeting image. Those on the P.C. watch will note that in this argument the culture of victimization reaches its nadir: Because of the vulnerability of a few, everybody must be treated like a child. In this scenario, everyone is a victim--a victim of art.

What Reno, like Plato, wants from artists is not art, it is edification. Art, by its nature, deals with complexity. The raw material of great drama is not answers but questions. Human interactions are fascinating precisely because they are enigmatic. The scene in Disney's film The Program in which young men lie down in the middle of the road was compelling because every adolescent male understands testing the limits, taking the dare. In this, the scene fits into a long tradition: Rebel Without a Cause's game of chicken, for example, or Stand By Me's bridge-crossing scene. It is tragic that boys died by imitating the scene from Disney's film. But the reason they imitated it is the same reason it was presented--because it was fascinating.

Such reasons are located deep within human nature. The illogic of violence has been a theme in literature from its beginnings with Homer, was exploited to great effect in Greek tragedy, brought explicitly to life in the hundreds of revenge plays that peppered the English Renaissance, and continues to fascinate in works as varied as Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, Joseph Heller's Catch-22, and the recent television movie, A Mother's Revenge, which, while fictional, reverberates with the story of Ellie Nessler, who, frustrated with the justice system, shot and killed the man who had molested her child. We know that violence is wrong, everything around us reinforces that conviction, and yet sometimes we become violent. Why do humans act irrationally? That was Mr. Spock's eternal question in Star Trek, it is the question that lurks in every romantic comedy or murder mystery, and it is the grain of sand that irritates and motivates those of us who make up stories. If everyone acted logically, if everyone followed the rules, we wouldn't need fiction, and Orwell's 1984 would make no sense. It is the defiance in us that fascinates, not the compliance.

What is really at issue here is the war within human nature, the conflicts between what we know to be the law and what we feel. That theme has been explicit at least since Antigone. Sometimes the law is wrong, or does not adequately address an individual situation. And sometimes an individual feels compelled to go outside the law, even though objectively doing so is harmful. Thus, when the mother shoots her child's rapist in A Mother's Revenge, the script clearly portrays that deed as wrong, and yet it is an action the audience can understand. The question, "What would you do?" was prominent in the advertising for that movie. The point of the film was not to "answer" the question of revenge but to pose it, explore it. The story does not promote violence, glorify violence, or condemn violence. It is merely about violence.

Violence and danger are among the tools I have as a fiction maker, alongside sex, religion, truth, authority, honor, and every other human characteristic--strengths and weaknesses alike. Individually and in combination these characteristics can have tremendous effect, can lead people to laughter, outrage, understanding, compassion. But as tools, they have no value until they are used. Homer and Shake-speare, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorcese have used the tool of violence well to tell us some fundamental truths about ourselves. Many more have used violence poorly.

Aristotle said centuries ago that tragedy seeks to evoke pity and terror in the audience. This is as true now as it ever was. And something inside us wants pity and terror from more than just drama. Political campaigns are regularly about pity and terror, the daily news is about pity and terror, gossip is about pity and terror, gross-out contests among 10-year-olds are about pity and terror. Whatever the source of that need, it is fundamental to human nature, and somehow human nature always provides abundant stories, real or imagined, to supply the need.

The answer to television violence is not to treat adults like children but to recognize that children are capable of learning the lessons they will need as adults. Parents must teach their children at an early age that they are supposed to read television the same way they read a book--with care for the meaning. None of us is simple, so you must constantly read between the lines, verify what we say against your values and truths. Only then can you decide how to take what we say, to believe us, follow us, or condemn us.

Unless we learn to read the stories we are told better than we have been, we will continue to argue over nothing and to blame artists for problems that reside at the heart of human nature. If we use the recent, unfortunate incidents involving children and reckless adolescents to justify artistic regulation, we risk taking the beauty and greatness out of art. We will have to forbid artists to write about human beings. What we will leave behind is a tepid trail of catechisms for simpletons, bloodless tales no one would have any desire to watch in the first place, much less imitate.