Ben Stein Is Right Again For All the Wrong Reasons
Stafford Williamson
October 09, 2006
As I have said before, I greatly admire Ben Stein’s intellect. He is well spoken. And no, for me that is not “code” for a black person who speaks like a white person. Ben’s pretty pale to fall under any such presumed bias in any case. It is what it says, a person who speaks the language well, regardless of their origins or even the language they are speaking. I only speak one language well, one other language moderately poorly, and a couple more that I am more a listener than a speaker on any occasion, but that doesn’t mean I can’t judge, even in some foreign languages, who speaks well. But as usual, I digress.
Ben had a commentary on the CBS Sunday Morning program today. I found myself saying, to myself and to my wife, “Yes, he’s right.” Only to realize after a moment’s contemplation that although he was making a good point, I completely disagreed with the reasons he was making this commentary, and moreover that for a substantial portion of what he was saying, if we “paid attention” to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the way that Ben was referring to these tragic travesties, it would likely be to prosecute the battles with greater vigor. Well, perhaps not. I think Ben is too smart to be sitting in the dark, figuratively, with the proverbial wool pulled over his eyes by Republican Party policy. But still, it seems to me, that the reason Mr. Stein was calling on the American Public to get over the trivialities of a single congressman flirting, however overtly, with young men of legal age and pay attention to the serious problems in the world. I deduce, however, that his underlying purpose was to soften the political blow being taken by Republican Leaders and by association the whole of the Republican Party nationally. Yes, I said “legal age.”
The media is so busy fanning the flames of the so-called “scandal” that they are throwing around words like “predator” and “underage” as if they applied to this case. They do not. At least they do not in any of the specific instances that have thus far come to light. It has been widely reported, and equally blatantly ignored, that the legal age of consent for young men in the District of Columbia is 16 years. That is, not entirely coincidentally, the age at which surveys show the average teens become active sexually, somewhere within that year. The Congressional Page Program is a subject on which I, like most of the country, must confess mainly ignorance, except that they are required to be high school students, and, it is my understanding, they must be “juniors”, which is to say in their second to last year of high school. Doubtless there are at least some exceptional students who are ahead of their peers and so may arrive on the steps of the Capital before their 16th birthdays, but in the main, that is their age.
Now I guess that everyone has the “right” to be morally outraged at whatever they choose to be morally outraged about. Victorians reportedly were shocked at ankles being revealed. In those times “bathing costumes” for both men and women covered from clavicles to metatarsals. That is, from the neck to below the ankle.
My wife has recently been “accusing” me of being a showoff. I not only acknowledge that tendency, I pointed out that I was an actor before I met her and still do the occasional turn, in addition to standing in front of dozens or hundreds of people every day. I confess. I crave your attention! I would be only too delighted if you would check out my other articles or my web site and the books I have written.
But back to our stage of outrage. I fear that yours and mine may not be in synch. I have been in the position of many of the pages involved in this scandal, and close to the position of some of the others. That is to say, having been an actor, it was not uncommon for me to be the object of admiration of older gay men. On at least one occasion I have been offered a job by someone with the influence to make such an offer happen on what clearly appeared to be his hope that by becoming my sponsor and mentor that he would have at minimum opportunities to admire my physique (ah, those were the days, when my physique actually was admirable, … sigh), and more likely, I deduced, to have some evenings in which to woo me. Now let us be clear, here. My personal orientation is none of your business, but I can tell you that it was very interesting to be admired in such a way. I was, at the time I am referring to, very close to the same age as the Congressional Pages.
As a parent, if you are one, you may well be thinking that you wouldn’t want your son, or daughter for that matter, to be leered at and drooled over, accosted or dated by someone 30 years or more older than them. Experience tells us that such encounters are likely to be short term and at best unfulfilling, and we would like to protect our youngsters from such “predatory” behavior. On the other hand, the errant Congressman, while less discreet that he should have been, did nothing illegal. Investigators, including the FBI are searching for some evidence of a statute being broken, but they are already looking into local jurisdictions where the page alumni lived, all over the country, when they received the alleged affronts. All of this is in search of some rule of law that was violated. So far, at least as far as I know (not being privy to the details of their investigations) no infractions have occurred. Certainly none have been reported, and no one has been charged.
That is, no one has been legally charged, except the Republican Leadership. They have already been convicted in the media and presently are being tarred and feathered for failing to curtail the contacts that they reportedly knew about for several years. One fellow congressman characterized the messages as “overly friendly” in a television commercial he has already aired to exculpate himself by the fact that he reported this, so he says, to the Speaker’s offices and thus considered that to be his duty well discharged. Whether it was “well” discharged or not is a matter of perspective.
Does this rise to the level of “predatory” behavior? Doubtless if it came to the leadership’s attention, such behavior could bring a reprimand, perhaps even sanctions, but resignation in disgrace?
It has been said that if the Speaker’s office had pursued a vigorous course of action on the basis of that original report of “overly friendly” messages to pages, they would likely, as has been suggested in Washington, have been accused of being homophobic. In truth, isn’t that a significant element in scandalizing the public in this case? Isn’t it? Doesn’t the image of the middle aged male politician approaching teenage boys create much of the perceived “offense” in our minds? Which is to say: to create offense in the minds of conservatives with little or no sympathy for gays.
I recently had a rather conservative friend recommend my column to a fairly large audience of his friends and associates (with appropriate, even witty, cautions that I was politically leaning toward the “medium” shade of pinkish) so I won’t assume that everyone reading this will have forgiven our former President for his indiscretions with a certain intern with a fondness for blue dresses, but didn’t we eventually tire of the endless witch hunt?
My current concern is that while I find it somewhat satisfying that the Republicans are squirming at the negative reactions from the supposed “coverup” by the Speaker and his cronies, that what this really amounts to is carefully timed political witch hunting on the part of the Democratic party. Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Rahm Emanuel, when asked this morning on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, said carefully and specifically that he “never saw them” (the email messages). He worded his response sufficiently carefully and repeated that phrase exactly, “never saw them,” when pressed further that it appeared to be intentional posturing. Despite the fact that the interpretation of the writers in the link on Emanuel’s name just above is that this is a clear denial of involvement, I am student enough of lawyer-speak to recognize that he is avoiding admitting that he (as did much of the congress) had some general knowledge of Foley’s fondness for young men if not more specific involvement of the timing of this story.. Timing, they say in show business, is EVERYTHING. Clearly, whether the timing is perfect or not, the Democrats, having encouraged the media to bring this scandal into the spotlight, if not clearly into accurate focus. They, again, clearly, are playing politics on this one. I call that Dirty Politics, and I am disappointed that they have resorted to it.
Is it a good strategy? Probably. That is to say that it will likely result in better outcomes on Election Day for at some Democratic candidates. We will see stronger showings because at least some percentage of the strongly conservative religious voters, 25% of American voters according to a statistic I heard this morning, will have become disgusted with the failures of the Republican leadership to demonstrate moral superiority. These are the voters who came out en masse in 2004 to support anti-gay legislation, initiatives and specific measures against same gender unions regardless of what anyone else’s church, synagogue, or mosque might have to say on the matter.
It amounts to good jujitsu, that Oriental form of combat that uses leverage and the opponents’ own momentum against them. Homophobia has been a tool of the Republican Party for the past 7 years in particular. Using that aspect of the party’s character against them seems on the one hand to be their “just desserts,” but on the other, it is also dirty pool, underhanded and the very type of muckraking that I would rather not see associated with the folks governing our country, regardless of what label they hang on themselves.
Did Ben Stein have a good point? Yes, he certainly did. In the grand scheme of things, flirtatious, even vulgar, emails and instant messages to young men is a consummately trivial matter. Compare Iraq where nearly 30 American military persons died this week alone, while hundreds of Iraqis lives were also snuffed out by death squads that are reportedly operatives of sectarian militias which are also part of the current police forces. You will remember we, the Bush administration at least, were quite insistent that Iraq’s police and military could no longer be members or former members of the old Baathist Party that had supported Saddam Hussein. So now, instead of Sunni partisans in power we have Shiites committing the atrocities upon the minority Sunnis.
Ben also pointed to the Afghan situation where the Talaban are taking back much of the country, as we withdraw and turn “peace-keeping” over to NATO forces. There neighboring Pakistan is also teetering close to the brink of falling into the hands of the religious extremists who back al Qaeda and Bin Laden. Both the government of Hamid Karzai and the government of President General Pervez Musharraf are so weak and tenuous that we can do little to ensure their survival, especially without more military support.
Can we afford, morally or otherwise, to ignore the conflicts in Africa. Darfur is a blight on the whole of the planet’s governments. Genocide by roving militias that rivals, if not matches, those of recent Balkan ethnic cleansing, massive displacements of citizens, all compounded by starvation brought on not by famine or natural disaster, but through the politics of war and use of the “food weapon.” Chemical and nuclear weapons are the modern weapons of mass destruction, but starvation is the weapon of old by which whole states and civilizations have been brought down. Nor does the ethnic hatred pale in light of the purely greedy squabbling for control of the wealth of the resources of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Thousands of deaths have been reported there too.
The saying that art reflects life is clearly true in the work of some of the great artists. These days, one of our own GREAT artists is a writer named Aaron Sorkin. Aaron was the head writer and producer of the television hit, WEST WING (and more recently has reappeared in the new hit STUDIO 60 on the SUNSET STRIP). I dream that one day I might have the privilege of working with and learning from him, but in the meantime, let me try to recreate an often re-broadcast couple of lines from his White House drama. The scene is in the Oval Office. The President (played by Martin Sheen) asks his young, highly intelligent African-American aide, played by Dulé Hill, now of TV show PSYCH), “Does an American life count for more than an [African] one?” To which the aide replied, “I don’t know, sir, but to you it does.”
I don’t have all the answers. I don’t know whether it is “important” that Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) is committed to producing a billion gallons of ethanol next year, while Cargill, another agri-biz juggernaut, is only aiming for 220 million gallons, or even if it has anything to do with Cargill’s stated philosophy that they look to our productive farmlands for food, feed and fuel with prioritization in that order. I do know that a government subsidy that provides $0.51 per gallon to gasoline producers for every gallon of blended ethanol gasoline sold is a windfall to Midwestern agricultural interests, big and small. Classic “trickle down” Reagan-omics is what that looks like. It means billions of dollars for the big corporations so they can pay a few pennies more per bushel to the farmers. I do think it is predictive that ADM has hired a former Chevron executive Patricia Woertz to be their new President and CEO.
But I also find it terribly disappointing that Environment California has come out with a report that talks in terms of goals for 2025 that would improve our environment (well, in California, at least). What is disappointing about that? The “goals” are so limp and spineless that the Santa Barbara Junior Achievement in schools program should be able to bring about those kinds of changes in less time. Pitifully small reductions, pallid complected advances in technology, it is pathetic. Just thinking about how feeble their ambitions are has infected me with a lethargy that makes me want to shuffle off to my bedroom for my afternoon nap.
Was Ben Stein right? Of course he was. We need to pay more attention to more important things than one man’s lurid love notes. Will it be good for the Republican Party if we turn our focus away from the scandal? It probably won’t be a big help at this point. Nor will anything likely happen in the next few weeks with respect to Iraq, Afghanistan, nor the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Darfur, needs our immediate help, but we also need to recognize that the motives there are pretty much the same as what is going on in Iraq. It is another ethnic cleansing by religious fanatics and their followers in addition to a land grab and power play in Sudanese politics.
Okay, I don’t like Ben Stein’s ulterior motives, but let’s stop the dying wherever we can as soon as we can. On that point, we can all agree, can’t we?
Oh, yes, and before I leave you, I would like to mention that at least one other writer for the Chronicle group, Philip F. Harris, was also a skeptic about WHY gasoline prices have been dropping so precipitously in recent weeks. Check out his reasoning.
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Stafford “Doc” Williamson
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