TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/102891/1028004.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.7 KB | 123 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 74

AMERICA ABROAD

How Tout le Monde Missed the Story


By Strobe Talbott


    At some particularly weird moment in the latest installment
of the Great American Melodrama, I had a consoling thought:
well, at least it can't get any worse than this. Maybe it was
when Howell Heflin, playing Senator Beauregard Claghorn, was in
the midst of some bloviation, the point of which seemed to have
escaped him. Or maybe it was when Orrin Hatch, playing Perry
Mason, revealed that a key piece of evidence, a pubic hair,
actually appeared on page 70 of The Exorcist and therefore
couldn't possibly have been in Clarence Thomas' Coke.

    But then I noticed something on TV for the first time:
amid the reporters covering the event were two whom I
recognized as members of the foreign press corps, both known for
their jaundiced eye and acid wit. My heart sank. It suddenly
occurred to me that having spent days watching our politicians
make prime-time fools of themselves, we Americans were soon
going to have to listen to Europeans lecture us on how immature
and naive we are. We heard it during Watergate, and we'd hear
it again now: Grow up, America! Start behaving like a superpower
instead of a Sunday school.

    Sure enough, last week Christine Toomey of the Sunday
Times of London wailed, "America has flung itself again into one
of the spasms of passionate moral debate that nations more
tolerant of human frailty find so hard to understand." In
Switzerland the Basler Zeitung concluded that "the most American
aspect of the affair" was that "behind the thin dam of wordy
morality, puritanical shyness and `ethics' swirls a sea of
corruption, madness and wickedness."

    As might have been expected, the French, who tend to be
connoisseurs of other nations' foibles, provided the most
piquant blend of sneering and scolding. "Since the arrival of
the pilgrim fathers," said Le Monde in a front-page editorial,
"America has never truly settled its account with sin. The old
Puritan heritage periodically surges forth from the collective
memory, invading the national life and upsetting the political
game. But over time, these resurgences of prudery have grown in
cruelty, bordering today on the absurd."

    In some ways the distant voices echoed the disgust that
many Americans felt about the Thomas matter. But in a critical
respect, a number of European commentators betrayed their own
obtuseness. They depicted the embattled judge as a
villain/victim in the tradition of John Profumo, the British
Minister of War whose fling with a call girl, and his lies about
it to Parliament, cost him his job in 1963. Fleet Street was
none too tolerant of human frailty then, nor was it earlier this
month when Sir Allan Green, the chief prosecutor for England and
Wales, was caught soliciting a prostitute and resigned.

    In short, some Europeans saw the Thomas affair as a sex
scandal. Hence all the scorn for American "prudery" and
"puritanism."

    To be sure, there were some distinctly X-rated moments,
especially when it was Hatch's turn to work with the raw
material of Anita Hill's allegations. More than once it seemed
as though he was about to summon Long Dong Silver to appear
before the Judiciary Committee in person (or worse).

    Still, in its essence, Hill v. Thomas had almost nothing
to do with what happens between consenting adults. It wasn't
about sex at all, except in the most G-rated sense that Hill is
a woman, Thomas a man. What most Americans understood -- and
many Europeans apparently failed to grasp -- was that there
was, if not a saving grace, then at least a mitigating factor
in this otherwise bizarre and lamentable business: yet again,
American politics was struggling with the shortcomings of
American society.

    Even though the men in charge of the hearings included
several demonstrable buffoons and hypocrites who were under
duress from outraged constituents, the fact remains that they
were part of a peculiarly American process of trying, ever so
imperfectly, to perfect the rules of civilized behavior, to get
it right and to shake the bad habits of the past.

    At the heart of all the silliness and nastiness was an
attempt to address a fundamental question of decency and
fairness: How, in the best of all possible worlds, should
citizens treat each other? More specifically, how should men
treat women? At issue, in other words, was not sin in the eyes
of God or in the preachings of Cotton Mather, but rights, as
protected by the Constitution and defined in U.S. law.

    Granted, a few overseas observers did get the point. The
Times of London acknowledged, "The Americans have blazed this
new and elusive trail for mutual respect in the workplace, as
they have in many other areas of women's rights," and the
Economist saw at the heart of a flawed system "a commitment to
individual dignity."

    Far more typical, however, was the response just across
the Channel. Alan Riding, the Paris bureau chief of the New
York Times, noted that many French commentators were "ignoring
the broader question of sexual harassment." That may be because
they had yet to get past the first syllable and comprehend what
the phrase sexual harassment really means.

    Writing in the New York Times on Friday, the British
novelist Fay Weldon nicely diagnosed the divide between the Old
World and the New on this issue: "We are well enough attuned to
racism; sexism, alas, scarcely upsets us. You in the U.S. have
serious thoughts about `gender' -- we go on thinking about sex."

    Which is why so many editors on her side of the Atlantic,
in covering the big story out of Washington, got it wrong.