Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/060192/06019926.000

Text File | 1992-09-10 | 11KB | 217 lines

                                                                                U.S. POLITICS, Page 28

But Seriously, Folks . . .


Dan Quayle's wacky attack on TV's Murphy Brown obscures a
serious discussion about motherhood, morality and government's
responsibility

By LANCE MORROW -- With reporting by Tom Curry and Georgia
Harbison/New York


    Americans talked about it in coffee shops and check-out
lines and elevators. In the Rose Garden of the White House,
George Bush stood with Brian Mulroney, trying to hold a press
conference about matters of state. The hounds of the press
frisked and barked in excitement until their intermingled
questions sounded something like Murf! Murf! Murf!

    The Prime Minister of Canada turned to the President of
the U.S. and asked in some puzzlement, "Who is Murphy Brown?"

    The basic answer was easy: Murphy Brown does not exist.
She is the TV character played by Candice Bergen. Murphy is a
blond media anchor-goddess and wise guy and now a defiantly
unmarried madonna. In last week's episode she delivered a baby
boy -- the boy being played by a seven-week-old girl named
Danica Fascella. (A perfect Murphy Brown, post-Quayle touch:
Danica and her twin Cynthia were conceived in vitro and carried
to term by a surrogate mother.) In triumphant autonomy, Murphy
will raise the child as a single parent.

    But an outpouring of emotion and opinion about Murphy
Brown has proved to be unexpectedly interesting and bizarre. A
Murphy Brown debate has gone layering up through a dozen levels
of American life -- political, moral, cultural, racial, even
metaphysical. The exercise has seemed amazingly stupid,
obscurely degrading and somehow important at the same time.

    Vice President Dan Quayle precipitated it. He and Murphy
Brown collaborated in one of those vivid, strange electronic
moral pageants, like the Thomas-Hill hearings, that are becoming
a new American form. This is national theater: surreal,
spontaneous, mixing off-hours pop culture with high political
meanings, public behavior with private conscience, making
history up with tabloids and television personalities like Oprah
Winfrey. The trivial gets aggrandized, the biggest themes
cheapened. America degenerates into a TV comedy -- and yet
Americans end up thinking in new ways about some larger matters.
The little television screen, the bright and flat and often
moronic medium of these spectacles, works in strange
disproportions of cause and effect: often, in wild
disconnections of cause and effect, video Dada.

    Quayle was in San Francisco, market-testing a line of
traditional-values rhetoric for more elaborate use as the
presidential campaign progresses. The Los Angeles riots were
still flickering on the edges of everyone's mind. In a speech
before the Commonwealth Club, Quayle came down hard on "lawless
social anarchy" -- as opposed, presumably, to lawful anarchy.
He spoke of "the breakdown of family structure, personal
responsibility and social order in too many areas of our
society," of "a welfare ethos that impedes individual efforts
to move ahead in society . . ." He acknowledged the "terrible
problem with race and racism," adding that "the evil of slavery
has left a long legacy." But the core of the speech was law and
order. It bristled with words like "indulgence and
self-gratification . . . glamourized casual sex and drug use."

    The speech -- if one deleted the Murphy Brown passage --
was a reasonably persuasive and sometimes eloquent sampler: a
punitive-inspirational hymn to hard work, family, integrity and
personal responsibility. Some people later took Quayle's words
to be fatuous white-bread truisms -- Norman Rockwell evocations
of an America long gone. But if the ideas could be considered
outside the inflammatory political and racial context of the
moment, they had a ring of common sense. A number of black
leaders, including Jesse Jackson, might have made the same
points without controversy -- and have. The family, Quayle said,
is important, and "the failure of our families is hurting
America deeply . . . Children need love and discipline. They
need mothers and fathers. A welfare check is not a husband. The
state is not a father . . . Bearing babies irresponsibly is,
simply, wrong."

    Then Quayle dropped in a paragraph that produced the
spectacularly silly media effect: "It doesn't help matters when
prime-time TV has Murphy Brown -- a character who supposedly
epitomizes today's intelligent, highly paid professional woman
-- mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone
and calling it just another `life-style choice.'"

    F. Scott Fitzgerald said it is a sign of genius to be able
to entertain in the mind two mutually contradictory ideas
without going insane. America does not think of itself as a
genius anymore. A number of Americans went crazy when they heard
Quayle's line about Murphy Brown.

    At the first level, Quayle's Ozzie and Harriet universe,
with its freckle-faced nuclear-family suburban reassurances,
collided with that of successful autonomous career women like
the one portrayed in Murphy Brown. The executive producer of
Murphy Brown, Diane English, had a well-machined answer for
Quayle: "If the Vice President thinks it's disgraceful for an
unmarried woman to bear a child, and he believes that a woman
cannot adequately raise a child without a father, then he'd
better make sure abortion remains safe and legal." Given that
Murphy Brown was pregnant, what did Quayle expect her to do?
Have an abortion? Her decision to go ahead and have the child
was in harmony with the Administration's pro-life convictions.
Why criticize her then? Harrumph: she should never have got
pregnant in the first place. Or, more pertinently: the creators
of the program should not have concocted the pregnancy dilemma
for Murphy, thereby making her ultimate choice seem like a
legitimizing and glamourizing of single motherhood.

    At a second, less explicit layer of meaning, the Quayle
line took on complex racial colorations. He suggested that
Murphy Brown was a bad role model for unmarried females. In the
speech's context, he was talking about single mothers in the
ghetto. But like so much in last week's odd episode, there were
signs of hip shooting and inadvertence.

    In fact, few young black females watch Murphy Brown. The
show, which in overall audience is the third most popular on
network television, ranks 56th in popularity among American
blacks. So the idea that Murphy's single motherhood encourages
black adolescent girls to follow the same course loses its
force.

    The racial dimension flows naturally into the political,
where the uglier side of Quayle's mission begins to become
apparent. One of Quayle's amazing but unlikable feats last week
was metaphorically to transform old Willie Horton into a
beautiful blond fortyish wasp has-it-all knockout. (Horton was
the black murderer who raped a housewife while on furlough
during the time that 1988 Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis
was Governor of Massachusetts; the Bush campaign used Horton to
ridicule Dukakis.) So in 1992, by Quayle's interesting
subliminal design, Murphy carries at least some of Willie's
message: mindless liberalism allied with black anarchy (ruined
families, unwed mothers, crime, drugs) leads quickly to social
breakdown.

    If Quayle has no malign racial-political intent, he might
point out, when discussing the miseries of families, that, for
example, Eastern prep schools are filled with children packed
off to get them away from divorce, incest, alcoholism, child
abuse, wife battering and other horrors at home. The willingness
to let the racist implication stand unchallenged, unexamined,
loitering on the threshold, is the ugliest aspect of all this.

    Quayle in part plays the Spiro Agnew role to Bush's
Richard Nixon. But when Agnew went after the "nattering nabobs"
and student protesters, he did so with a thuggish menace that
Quayle lacks. Quayle smacks more of Midwestern Americana, of The
Music Man's Professor Harold Hill, and Quayle's lines about
unmarried mothers sounded like an echo: "We got trouble, right
here in River City!" -- brazen hussies strutting around town in
a family way: Make your blood boil? Well, I should say!

    In the Bush-Quayle synecdoche, attitude, symbolism and
code words stand in for real action and accomplishment. The
Bush Administration is short on both coherent programs and
resources of leadership to approach the problems. An elaborate
rhetorical porch, with gorgeous traditional columns, fronts an
empty house. In any case, Presidents, Vice Presidents and other
public officials are elected to lead and act first of all. Moral
leadership and vision are vital, but somehow the right to
deliver sermons has to be convincingly earned.

    Quayle makes much of the theme of the absent father;
America under the Bush Administration looks like a house with
an absent father. A man has no right to abandon the family for
years and then show up one day and go upstairs and start
spanking the kids.

    Television, which has all but taken over the American
political process, turning the parties into the old technology,
is the perfect medium for a battle of weightless, sensational
symbolisms. Not that the images don't have real effect: a
homemade video of a black motorist being beaten by police
succeeded in burning down a sizable part of Los Angeles. The
moral struggle between Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown seemed
perfect and fascinating, as if all the weaknesses of both
politics and television (the short attention span, the brainless
evanescence, the disconnection) were leaking into one another.

    If the Vice President wanted to attack television's
effects on the American young, he might have hit the medium on
30 or 40 more serious matters before coming to Murphy Brown's
marital status. By age 20, an American child will have watched
700,000 TV commercials. According to New York University
professor and media critic Neil Postman, "There are several
messages in these ads: that all problems are solvable, that the
solutions are quickly available through use of some chemical,
food, drug or machine." Television creates the culture of
immediate gratification, not primarily through its comedy shows
but through its advertising. Says Postman: "If anyone wants to
relate the Los Angeles riots to TV shows, everyone in the U.S.
sees television shows communicating the message that these are
the things all Americans are entitled to: TV sets, cars and so
on. The riots were in part driven by this sense of entitlement."

    Issues of family, morals and values are important -- and
may ultimately be central to solving problems, especially those
of the black underclass. But if they are to be discussed merely
on the level of Murphy Brown, it is going to be a long and
loathsome campaign.