TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/102891/1028640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.8 KB | 120 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 104

Truths in The Ruins


By Lance Morrow


    America is still too young to have convincing ruins.
Instead of admiring the tumbled stones of their former
civilizations, Americans can only return to their memorable
fiascoes, where they can weep and think of Ozymandias, king of
kings. They can revisit Watergate and Vietnam, for example, or
penetrate to the remoter pageants of McCarthyism or the
stock-market crash of 1929. Poking around in the remnants of
disaster can tell you where you have been and what you have been
capable of.

    Americans in the future may enjoy replaying the fiasco of
the Thomas confirmation hearings: primal, defining national
theater. The drama had layers -- legal, political, cultural,
racial, ethical, sexual. The hearings were a bad moment for
middle-aged white men. The Senate Judiciary Committee sat
arrayed in its Caucasian glory, like Muppets of Bomfog and
Claghorn, each Senator more confused and senescent and miserable
and lost to pomposity than the last -- a row of flushed egos
that said goodbye to dignity and intelligence sometime during
the Eisenhower years.

    But in this drama the elected Senators did not represent
America. Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill did. The soap opera that
brought them together was as sleazy, corrupt and stupid as much
of the nation's life has become. But the business touched deep
matters. It was about man and woman, about sex and power, about
ambition and desire. The hearings, almost a new art form,
commingled private tragedy, public farce, office mini-series,
and ideological bonfire.

    The most terrible of the American ruins is slavery, folly
of follies. It has left its living cinders all over the
geographical and moral landscape: in the South Bronx and South
Side Chicago, in bigoted hearts and in the despairs and
self-contempt of those left in the ruins.

    The importance of the Thomas hearings may have been more
in the area of race than that of sex. The issue of sexual
harassment came to no resolution there, so the aftermath on that
score remains full of glaring anger. But the Thomas proceedings
had an unexpected cleansing power where race is concerned. The
antagonists were black. The drama was universal. The crime of
racism is to deny the humanity of people with skin of a
different color. Tolerance arises from a recognition of oneself
in others, from seeing in a separate being all one's own
possibilities, weaknesses, appetites, loves, lapses,
brutalities, decencies. The leading players in the Thomas drama,
and many in the supporting cast, were accomplished, gifted,
attractive, ambitious, complicated Americans -- and in this
case, incidentally, African Americans. The hearings called forth
a procession of people diverse and successful in ways not
normally visible to white America.

    No stereotypes this time. No Cosby, Oprah, Willie Horton,
Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan, Jesse Jackson. The black
nominee was a conservative, not a predictable character with a
predictable party line. What's this? Blacks are different from
one another? Think different thoughts? Men and women, of
whatever race, could not begin to search for the truth in the
case without looking into themselves.

    Mystery hates the relentless predictabilities of dogma. It
was a mystery that was on display before the Senate Judiciary
Committee. That part of the truth was available to anyone whose
mind was not lost in dense preconceptions. Politics and ideology
have their organizational uses but are in general the enemies
of deeper human truth. According to the polls, Americans around
the country did not subscribe to the ideological conclusion to
which so many in the women's movement leaped -- the appalling
syllogism that: 1) sexual harassment is horrible and widespread
(it has happened to me and to many I know); 2) Anita Hill (and
only Hill, but that's enough because that's the way harassment
happens) says he did it; therefore 3) Clarence Thomas is guilty
as charged (without trial), should be kept off the Supreme
Court, and bears the monstrous guilt of all men everywhere, so
now that he is on the court all his future decisions, including
any possible opinions on Roe v. Wade, are illegitimate, the
product of his sick mind. And by extension, all future
decisions of this conservative Supreme Court affecting women are
contaminated by what Anita Hill claims to have happened years
ago between a man and a woman in an office -- words about pubic
hair on a Coke can and about a porn star with a large member.
Ideology bludgeons the novelistic truth of character into its
own preconceptions.

    Something is missing here, something we will never know.
But frothing ideology will not tell us: if Clarence Thomas is
a conservative, that does not make him a sexual harasser. What
he may or may not decide about Roe v. Wade has no bearing upon
what Anita Hill claims about his conduct. Sometimes men
sexually harass vulnerable women. Women may have predatory
agendas too. Not all women are innocent, vulnerable victims. And
sometimes men are monsters. Reality is rich and impish and
asymmetrical. It laughs at manifestos.

    After Clarence Thomas finished the first round of
confirmation hearings, I would have voted against him on the
grounds that he simply did not know enough -- too strange and
green, I thought, too many vectors in his character firing off
in different directions. I could see a black nationalist inside
him fighting it out with a Reaganite. But last week I would have
taken a chance and voted in his favor. His life is beginning
now. It belongs entirely to him, I surmise, for the first time.
He will not be the Justice that ideologues of either side have
predicted. He will surprise them all.