A Certain Idea of America, page 29
More men of the media have fallen in the reckoning over sexual abuse, most famously a bright, humorous, ratings-busting veteran anchorman, who reportedly had a switch on his desk that locked his office door so he could molest the women he’d trapped inside. He had no idea how to be a man.
Here is something to ground us in the good: Pope John Paul II’s 1995 “Letter to Women,” sent to the Fourth World Conference on Women, in Beijing. As a document it has more or less fallen through history’s cracks. But it’s deeply pertinent to this moment and was written with pronounced warmth by a man who before he became a priest hoped to be a playwright. Here is what he said:
You would never be so low as to abuse women if you knew what they are and have been in the history of humanity: “Women have contributed to that history as much as men and, more often than not, they did so in much more difficult conditions. I think particularly of those women who loved culture and art, and devoted their lives to them in spite of the fact that they were frequently at a disadvantage” in education and opportunity. Women have been “underestimated, ignored and not given credit for their intellectual contributions.” Only a small part of their achievements have been documented, and yet humanity knows that it “owes a debt” to the “great, immense, feminine ‘tradition.’ ” But, John Paul exclaimed, “how many women have been and continue to be valued more for their physical appearance than for their skill, their professionalism, their intellectual abilities, their deep sensitivity; in a word, the very dignity of their being!”
In a highly personal tone—the italics are his—he offers his appreciation: “Thank you, women who work! You are present and active in every area of life—social, economic, cultural, artistic and political.” You “unite reason and feeling” and establish “economic and political structures ever more worthy of humanity.”
He thanked women who are mothers, daughters, and wives: “Thank you, every woman, for the simple fact of being a woman.”
Women, he observed, have “in every time and place” suffered abuse, in part because of “cultural conditioning,” which has been “an obstacle” to their progress. “Women’s dignity has often been unacknowledged and their prerogatives misrepresented; they have often been relegated to the margins of society and even reduced to servitude. This has prevented women from truly being themselves, and it has resulted in a spiritual impoverishment of humanity.” Poor thinking and cold hearts have contributed to the conditioning; some blame “has belonged to not just a few members of the Church.”
Members of the Christian faith must look both back and forward. To free women “from every kind of exploitation and domination,” we must learn from “the attitude of Jesus Christ himself,” who transcended “the established norms of his own culture” and “treated women with openness, respect, acceptance and tenderness.”
There is “an urgent need to achieve real equality in every area; equal pay for equal work, protection for working mothers, fairness in career advancements, equality of spouses with regard to family rights.”
And listen to this alarm—again, from twenty-two years ago: John Paul hit hard on “the long and degrading history…of violence against women in the area of sexuality”: “The time has come to condemn…the types of sexual violence which frequently have women for their object, and to pass laws which effectively defend them from such violence.”
There is more, and I urge you to read it, but it is a very modern document, a feminist statement in the best sense. When a friend sent it this week and I reread it, what I thought was, If all the now-famous sexual abusers had ever pondered such thoughts (as opposed to parroting them on the air before flipping the switch and locking the door) and considered questions of true equality, they never would have done what they did. They wouldn’t have been able to think of women as things, as mere commodities to be used for imperial pleasure. They would have had to consider their dignity.
At the heart of the current scandals is a simple disrespect and disregard for women, and an inability to love them.
A few things on my mind as the scandals progress: Friends, especially of my generation, fear that things will get carried away—innocent men will be railroaded, the workplace will be swept with some crazy new Puritanism. A female journalist wryly reflected, “This is America—what’s worth doing is worth overdoing.”
This would be bad. America takes place in the office, and anywhere America takes place there will be the drama of men and women. It is not wrong to fear it will become a dry, repressed, politically correct zone, no longer human.
But the way I see it, what’s happening is a housecleaning that’s long overdue. A big broom is sweeping away bad behaviors and bad ways of being. It’s not pleasant. If you’re taking joy in it, there’s something wrong with you.
The trick is to leave the place cleaner, not colder.
Common sense will help. Offices aren’t for ten-year-olds but for adults. Deep down you know what abuse is: You can tell when someone’s taking or demanding what isn’t his. By adulthood you should also know what friendliness, appreciation, and attraction are. But it comes down to whether someone is taking or demanding what isn’t his.
As for unjust accusations, it is true—they will come. Just accusations used to be ignored; in the future unjust ones will be heard.
Here the press will be more important than ever. They have just broken a scandal through numbers and patterns—numbers of accusers and patterns of behavior. If journalists stick to this while also retaining their deep skepticism and knowledge of human agendas, things will stay pretty straight. So far, American journalists have been sober and sophisticated, and pursued justice without looking for scalps. Human resources departments will have to operate in the same way—with seriousness and knowledge of human nature.
My concern is something else. It is that young women, girls in high school, young women in college and just starting out, are going to have too heightened a sense of danger in the workplace, too great a sense of threat.
But there are more good men and women out there than bad.
There are more good ones than bad.
Know balance. Have faith.
MRS. SMITH’S TIPS FOR NEW LAWMAKERS
December 10, 2020
We have a new Congress coming in, the 117th, to be sworn in on January 3, and its members could benefit from Margaret Chase Smith’s rules of the road. Mrs. Smith was the first senator of either party to stand up to Joe McCarthy. Her fellow Republicans scrammed: McCarthy was popular back home. So did Democrats; they feared McCarthy, too. What she’d done and suffered through made her name. History appreciated her, and so did flinty, independent Maine.
The problem with McCarthy was that he was reckless and cynical but there was some truth in his overall position. There were communists in the U.S. government. Alger Hiss was one. But not the 205 or 81 of them he’d claim, and not the innocent people he smeared and whose lives he ruined. So standing against him was a delicate thing: Your moral disapproval had to be both compelling and calibrated, acknowledging the truth but asserting other, higher, longer-ranged truths.
She did that. What can those being sworn in learn from her?
Know what you’re about and say it. Smith wasn’t much for grand political theory; she was plainer than that and closer to the ground. But she knew why she belonged to her party and she had a picture of it in her head. Her Republican Party was Lincoln’s party of justice and mercy, Teddy Roosevelt’s of “trustbusting,” Dwight D. Eisenhower’s of “peace” and “world leadership.” David Richards, director of the Margaret Chase Smith Library in Skowhegan, Maine, told me, “Being a politician in her conception was about service and conscience more than ideology.” But she had a philosophical approach and she didn’t shy from stating it. In her stump speech when she ran for president in 1964 she said, “I call myself a moderate or independent Republican. I operate independently of the party but I never fight the organization.” She named where she stood: “I am at the left of [Barry] Goldwater, and at the right of [Nelson] Rockefeller.”
If you want to be believed, say it straight. She didn’t think public remarks should be fancy, and she probably wouldn’t recognize the airy, edgeless statements we mistake for eloquence. “My speeches in the Senate are blunt and to the point,” she said. “I do not indulge in political oratory.” “I study the facts, make up my mind, and stick to my decisions. I never dodge an issue.”
Your state is more than a platform for your rise. Her connection to Maine was almost mystical. “She was Maine,” said her biographer, Patricia L. Schmidt, author of Margaret Chase Smith: Beyond Convention, by telephone. What deepened her knowledge is that her entire life had been one long status shift. Her mother was a waitress, her father a barber; she was the oldest of six and didn’t go to college but to work at the telephone company. She wound up as ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, putting the CEO of Lockheed on hold.
She knew how the salesgirl at the five-and-dime saw the world because she’d been one; how businesspeople thought because she’d been one of them, too. She wasn’t exactly awed by the patriarchy. Her father was an alcoholic and not fully stable, her late husband a philanderer who hurt and embarrassed her. (No one knew, but she quietly supported the mother of his illegitimate child, Ms. Schmidt says.) From this emotional background she rose to social respectability, which was her real status shift and allowed her to be an outsider-insider.
Travel broadens but struggle deepens, and gives you unexpected insights. When she was at odds with the sentiment of her state she didn’t think, My people hold some old-fashioned views, I’ll have to be careful. She felt leaders set an example of how to think, make an argument for a point of view, help bring people along. She believed the imperative of politics was not to accept but to improve.
Don’t abandon the middle ground, which actually exists. We’re a big and varied country. Maine isn’t Mississippi. People can be ornery about their rights and slippery about their responsibilities. No one likes being lectured. Lead toward your conception of the right but always seek middle ground. Never leave it abandoned. Do that and the country splits into separate camps.
Understand you won’t always be appreciated. Smith was a breakthrough woman who encouraged women to enter politics. She backed an Equal Rights Amendment, but 1970s feminists didn’t acknowledge her accomplishments and called her “elitist,” by which they meant “Republican.” An idiot from the National Organization for Women said Smith stood for “everything women in the liberation movement want to eliminate.” Smith in turn didn’t like their lack of decorum and criticized their air of anger and grievance. She felt those attitudes would cause division in the great center, and that change lasts when it comes through inspiration, not accusation.
People need concrete help. If Smith were with us now, she would doubtless wear a face mask—she’d lived through the 1918 flu pandemic—and she would lacerate the government for not sending face masks to every American last spring. If it didn’t have them in reserve it should have admitted it, not gone back and forth about whether masks are necessary. Health officials could have told people how to make them at home; they could have sent cloth. I imagine her saying, “You can’t suddenly change your mind and command people to go to the drugstore or Amazon. Not everyone has a computer, not everyone has a charge card; it’s your job to help them!”
Spirit has its place. Smith didn’t much like John F. Kennedy; she saw him as a Massachusetts glamour boy. She was willing to work with him when he became president, but it started out rocky when she fought one of his foreign-policy appointments because the appointee’s oil interests might skew his thinking on the Mideast. JFK took revenge by visiting Maine and forgetting to invite her to the greeting party. She ignored the snub, jumped on a plane, went anyway, and merrily waved at the crowds. Seeing her moxie, he changed tack. Would she like to ride back to Washington with him on gleaming Air Force One? No, she said, snubbing him back. And made sure the story got around. Later he called her “formidable.”
Human sentiment matters. It’s not a byproduct of a political life, or any life, it’s the product. People should have honest feelings and show them, as opposed to, say, commoditizing your emotions for public consumption. When JFK died there was a lot of oratory in the Senate. She didn’t speak. She listened for a while and then crossed the aisle, unpinned the rose she wore each day on her lapel, and placed it quietly on his old desk. Everyone saw. No one touched that rose for days. I remember hearing years ago that when Smith died, on Memorial Day 1995, someone put a rose on her old desk. No one knows who, but the rose went similarly undisturbed. I’m not sure it’s true, but it should be.
MIND YOUR MANNERS, SAYS EDITH WHARTON
August 22, 2019
This week we turn the column over to Edith Wharton (1862–1937), the great woman of letters and author of the Gilded Age novels The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, and The Custom of the Country. She was the first American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. She was also named a chevalier of the Legion of Honor for her valiant assistance to her beloved France during World War I.
Mrs. Wharton:
I have been invited this late August evening to speak to the American people about the decline in their public manners, which has reached crisis stage.
I would have preferred a radio address by what is called nationwide hookup but I am told my voice, which is reminiscent of that of Eleanor Roosevelt, carries inferences of another age, which might undercut the pertinence and urgency of my message.
I freely admit that there are several ways to describe me, and fabulous old battle-ax is one. But I know some things about human society, and can well imagine the abrading effect of a widespread collapse of public courtesy.
You have all become very rude. Not from ignorance, as Americans were in the past, but from indifference and amid affluence.
In your daily dealings you have grown slovenly, indifferent, and cold. A great nation cannot continue in this way. Nations run in part on manners; they are the lubricant that allows the great machine to hum.
Among the harassments I see you inflict on each other:
It is discourteous to walk down a busy sidewalk with your eyes trained on a cellphone, barreling forward with disregard for others who must carefully make way and negotiate their bodies around yours so as not to harm you. You must think you are more important than the other citizens of the sidewalk. Who told you this? Who lied to you in this way?
Eyes on a phone and pods in your ears—have you no sense of community? You have detached from the reality around you, which is a subtle rebuff of your fellow citizens. You enter your own world. When Leonardo and Dr. Einstein entered their own worlds they encountered richness, a fierce originality that ultimately benefited all. Is that what you encounter?
You must have a sense of community! Take part, be part, see, and hear. Stop assuming everyone will work their way around you. That is the summoning of a calamity you will deserve.
You must come to understand that other people can hear you on the cellphone in confined public spaces such as the elevator. You must come to understand: Other people have a right not to hear your sound. They have a right not to hear your grating voice, your huffy exchanges that convey the banality of your interests, all of which, on a bad day, when spirits are low, can make those around you want to ruffle in their purse for a pistol with which to shoot themselves in the head.
It might be better if you were instead “there”—to make brief eye contact and nod, as if you are human beings on earth together. At the very least, understand you should delay the call until the elevator doors open.
Last week I was in a nail spa, as they’re called, idiotically. A woman in her thirties was screeching into her phone, which was on speakerphone mode. After a few moments I informed her she was disturbing others. She literally said, “I am closing a deal! I don’t care!”
And you wonder why socialism is making a comeback.
You have apparently forgotten that “Excuse me” is a request, not a command. “Excuse me” is an abbreviated question: “Would you excuse me, please? Thank you.” All in a soft voice. It is not a command to be barked as you push down the aisle at Walgreens.
There is the matter of “No problem.” You perform a small courtesy, I thank you, you reply “No problem.” Which implies, If it were a problem, lady, I wouldn’t do it. “If it were at all challenging I would never be courteous.” Why would you admit this to a fellow citizen? Why demoralize her in this way?
Similarly with “No worries.” A young person emails and asks me to do something, perhaps attend an event. I reply carefully, with gratitude and honest regret, that I am unable. The response? Two words: “No worries.” I’m tempted to answer, “You don’t worry me, dearie.” Of course I don’t; it would be like slapping the maid. But “no worries” claims a certain precedence—“I am in charge and instruct you not to feel anxiety about frustrating my wishes.” Child, you’re not in charge. Try “Thanks, I understand, I hope another time.”
First-name culture is fully established. It is vulgar and inhuman. It shows disrespect for person and privacy, and the mature experience it as assaultive. A first name is what you are called by your intimates, by friends and lovers. It does not belong in a stranger’s mouth. I may grant you permission to use it, that is my right. But you cannot seize permission—that is not your right.
I receive solicitations from people I’ve never met, “Dear Edie.” I honestly wonder, Do I know you? And then realize that’s what they want me to wonder, because if I think I might know them I’m more likely to respond. It’s not democratization, it’s marketing.
