Tobacco Documents Online

. -2046323556

A Nation of Finger Pointers 14 Twin malformations are cropping up in the American character: a nasty intolerance and a desire to blame everyone else for everything The busybody and the crybaby are getting to be the most conspicuous children on the American playground. The busybody is the bully with the ayatullah shine in his eyes, gauleiter of correctness, who barges around telling the other kids that they cannot smoke, be fat, drink booze, wear furs, eat meat or otherwise nonconform to the new tribal rules now taking shape. The crybaby, on the other hand, is the abject, manipulative little devil with the lawyer and, so to speak, the actionable dia- per rash. He is a mayor of Washington, arrested (and captured on videotape) as he smokes crack in a hotel room with a wom- an not his wife. He pronounces himself a victim-of the wom- an, of white injustice, of the universe. Whatever. Both these types, the one overactive and the other over- passive, are fashioning some odd new malformations of Amer- ican character. The busybodies have begun to infect American society with a nasty intolerance-a zeal to police the private lives of others and hammer them into standard forms. In Freudian terms, the busybodies might be the superego of the - American personality, the overbearing wardens. The cry babies are the messy id, all blubbering need and a virtually in- fantile irresponsibility. Hard pressed in between is the ego that is supposed to be healthy, tolerant and intelligent. It all adds up to what the Economist perceptively calls "a decadent puritanism within America: an odd combination of ducking responsibility and telling everyone else what to do." Zealotry of either kind-the puritan's need to regiment oth- Illustrations ForTIME ByArnold Roth

ers or the victim's passion for blaming everyone except him- self-tends to produce a depressing civic stupidity. Each trait has about it the immobility of addiction. Victims become addict- ed to being victims: they derive identity, innocence and a kind of devious power from sheer, defaulting helplessness. On the other side, the candlesnuffers of behavioral and political correctness enact their paradox, accomplishing intolerance in the name of tolerance, regimentation in the name of betterment. The spectacle of the two moral defectives of the school- yard jumping up and down on the social contract is evidence that America is not entirely a society of grownups. A drama in Encino, Calif.: a lawyer named Kenneth Shild built a basket- ball court in his yard, 60 feet from the bedroom window of a neighbor, Michael Rubin, also a lawyer. The bouncing of the basketball produced a "percussion noise that was highly an- noying," according to Rubin, who asked Shild and his son to stop playing. Shild refused, and Rubin, knowing that his rights allowed him to take action to stop a nuisance, sprayed water from his garden hose onto the neighbor's basketball court. Suit and countersuit. Rubin's restraining order limiting the hours of the day during which the Shilds could play was over- turned by an appeals-court judge. Each side seeks more than $100,000 in punitive damages. Shild argues mental stress. Ru- bin claims that his property has been devalued. Fish gotta swim. Locusts devour the countryside. Lawyers sue. For all the American plague of overlitigation, lawyers also act as a kind of priesthood in the rituals of American faith. Most religions preach a philosophical endurance of the imper- fections of the world. Suffering must be borne. Americans did not come to the New World to live like that. They operate on a pushy, querulous assumption of perfectibility on earth ("the pursuit of happiness"-their own personal happiness). That expectation, which can make Americans charming and unrea- sonable and shallow, is part of their formula for success. But it has led Americans into absurdities and discontents that others who know life better might never think of. The frontiersman's self-sufficiency and stoicism in the face of pain belong now in some wax museum of lost American self-images. Each approach, that of busybody or crybaby, is selfish, and each poisons the sense of common cause. The sheer stupidity of each seeps into public discourse and politics. Idiot in the original Greek meant someone who cared nothing for issues of public life. The pollster Peter Hart asked some young people in a focus group to name qualities that make America special. Silence. Then one young man said, "Cable TV." Asked how to encourage more young people to vote, a young woman replied, "Pay them." In her book Rights Talk, Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard Law School argues that the nation's legal language on rights is highly developed, but the language of responsibility is meager: "A tendency to frame nearly every social controversy in terms of a clash of rights (a woman's right to her own body vs. a fe- tus's right to life) impedes compromise, mutual understand- ing, and the discovery of common ground." B ut of course deciding about abortion is not easy. Compromise and common ground are difficult to find on many issues. The American social con- tract is fluid, rapidly changing, postmodernist, just as the American gene and culture pool is tur- bulently new every day. Life improvises rich dilemmas, but they fly by like commercial breaks, hallucinatory, riveting, half-noticed. What is the moral authority behind a social con- tract so vivid and illegible? Only the zealously asserted styles of the new tribes (do this, don't do this, look a certain way, think a certain way, and that will make you all right). When old coherences break down, civilities and tolerances fall away as well. So does an ideal of self-reliance and inner au- tonomy and responsibility. The new tribes, strident and anx- ious and dogmatic, push forward to impose a new order. Yet they seem curiously faddish, unserious: youth culture unites with hypochondria and a childish sense of entitlement. Long ago, Carry Nation actually thought the U.S. would be better off if everyone stopped drinking. The busybodies today worry not about their society but about themselves-they imagine that they would be beautiful and virtuous and live forever, if only you would put out that cigar.  15 TIME, AUGUST 12,1991

Nation r EXCULPATIONS Crybabies: Eternal Victims Hypersensitivity and special pleading are making a travesty of the virtues that used to be known as individual responsibility and common sense ByIESSEBIRNBAUM S ome folks just can't get along. There, in a grocery store in suburban Port- land, Ore., was cashier Tom Mor- gan, more or less minding his own business. And there also was cashier Randy Maresh, who seemed to delight in tormenting Mor- gan. At length Morgan got fed up, hired a lawyer and sued Maresh for $100,000 in damages. The complaint: Maresh "willfully and maliciously inflicted severe mental stress and humiliation ... by continually, intentionally and repeatedly passing gas di- rected at the plaintiff." Not only that: Mar- esh would "hold it and walk funny to get to me" before expressing himself. The defense countered with the argu- ment that breaking wind is a form of free speech, and that the right to flatulence was protected, in theory if not in so many words, by the First Amendment. After lis- 16 tening patiently to both sides, the judge concluded that the unusual form of aggres- sive expression was "juvenile and boorish," but he could find no Oregon law prohibit- ing it.,Case dismissed. That happened in 1987, and the tide of petty American litigiousness has kept on riSing to new, absurd heights. This is the age of the self-tort crybaby, to whom some disappointment-a slur, the loss of a job, an errant spouse, a foul-tasting can of beer, a slip on the supermarket floor, an unbe- coming face-lift-is sufficient occasion to claim huge monetary awards. It is also the age of the all-purpose vic- tim: the individual or group whose plight, condition or even momentary setback is not a matter that needs be solved by indi- vidual effort but constitutes a social prob- lem in itself. "We're not to blame, we're victims" is the increasingly assertive rally- ing cry of groups who see the American TIME. AUGUST 12. 1991 dream not as striving fulfilled but as un- achieved entitlement. Crybabyhood is all blame, no pain, for gain. And all too often it works. The law courts are only one of the cry- baby's many avenues of complaint; there is the street, the pulpit, the press. Public offi- cials, writers, children in school-all nowa- days hide behind euphemisms that are often silly, not to say condescending, lest they be castigated by the crybaby for even the most inadvertent slip or imagined in- sult to this race or that ethnic group. They are fleeing, in other words, before the crybaby's greatest talent: the ability to hand out guilt, frequently entangled in the sacred American discourse on rights. If drunk drivers get into trouble, they have the right to blame their bar owners, and in most states that right is backed up by law. If black moviemaker Spike Lee fails to win first prize at the Cannes Film Festival

1 for his Do the Right Thing, the reason is not that the judges deemed sex, lies and videotape the best movie; the reason is racism. So widespread is this sort of disaffec- tion, says author John Taylor in a sizzling Netiv York magazine article, that a double- barreled social phenomenon now threat- ens the real exercise of civil liberties. The first barrel is "victimology." The other is what George Washington University soci- ologist Amitai Etzioni calls the "rights in- dustry"-the creation by individuals and special-interest groups of freshly minted freedoms and prerogatives that must be upheld even when they are foolishly assert- ed, and whose transgression is-always-a matter for outcry. Just about everybody can claim a posi- tion in the rights brigade: those who smoke and those who don't; those who demand shelter for the homeless and those who support the right of the homeless to refuse shelter; those who claim rights for fetuses and those who want the right to make their own choice for abortion; those who want their teenagers taught to use condoms and those who insist on the right to keep their kids ignorant of such things; campus hood- lums who insult their fellow students and college administrators who promulgate censorious "rules of conduct" to prevent their students from giving offense to this or that ethnic group, sexual preference, or body type. Their "rights" give their claims-whatever they may be-an abso- lute air, and any attempt to thwart their claims turns them into victims. Under the corrosive influence of victim- ology, the principle of individual responsi- bility for one's own actions, once a vaunted American virtue, seems like a relic. "I have this image," says Roger Conner, executive director of Washington's liberal American Alliance for Rights & Responsibilities, "of human beings as porcupines, with rights as their quills. When the quills are activated, people can't touch each other." That touchiness, Conner adds, "is the visible fruit of the rise of self-absorbed individual- ism" over the past several decades. "The R word in our language is responsibility, and it has dropped from the policy dia- logue in America. A society can't operate if everyone has rights and no one has responsibilities." Public affairs professor William Gal- ston of the University of Maryland says the practice of blaming others stems from un- realistic expectations of the modern, risk- avoiding age. "If something bad happens to us," he says, "we are outraged because our lives are supposed to be perfect. Two generations ago, if infants were born with birth defects, it was considered an act of God or an act of nature. Today if the baby is not absolutely perfect, the tendency is to believe the doctor is responsible. We've created a set of social expectations and a legal structure in which the blame game can be played as never before." The combined result of those trends is to make a travesty of what used to be called plain common sense. To be sure, charla- tanism and dishonesty exist, and their vic- tims deserve the law's protection. Yes, big- otry is inexcusable, and those who suffer by it, as well as others, are right to oppose it, backed by the full weight of law. Certainly job discrimination on the basis of sex, age or disability is not only morally unconscio- nable but illegal. B ut what to think, for example, about the new area of litigious behavior that has blossomed and might be dubbed emotional tort law? Last March Ju- lie Rems, 26, who is deaf, competed in the early rounds of a Miss America contest in Culver City, Calif. Though she was warned that Miss America rules precluded anyone assisting her onstage, Rems nonetheless brought on an interpreter who helped her lip-read questions. Rems lost the contest and sued the pageant committee and others, charging violation of her civil rights as well as "embarrassment, humiliation and degrada- tion." The case has not yet come to trial. The University of California has a docket of similar suits long enough to keep the courts busy for years. Ten university at- torneys, in fact, work full time solely on cases involving employees. In one recent imbroglio, a U.C. Santa Cruz employee, citing emotional stress, sued a colleague and the university after the colleague wrote a message on official stationery la- beling him a racist. The plaintiff lost his case in two courts and plans to appeal to the state supreme court. He has meanwhile retired on a disability pension. These and similar actions are fertilized by new rules of comparative negligence that allow a plaintiff to recover damages in a lawsuit even if he is partly at fault; this means, for example, that a drunk driver who demolishes an illegally parked car can claim some damages from the defendant's insurer. Changes in ethical guidelines, moreover, permit attorneys to advertise for clients-all of which has made the law- suit business a battleground for greedy practitioners. The survey firm Jury Verdict Research estimates that jury awards to plaintiffs of $1 million or more leaped from 22 in 1974 to 558 in 1989. Those figures may be one reason why Congress is now considering a national tort-reform law aimed at restricting frivolous litigation. There is surely something new in the American air that inspired the estate of Christopher Duffy of Framingham, Mass., who stole a car from a parking lot and got killed in a subsequent accident, to sue the proprietor of the lot for failing to prevent auto thefts. The same ingredient in the Zeitgeist must have affected the Philadel- phia jury described by journalist Walter Olson in a new book, The Litigation Explo- sion. The jury awarded $986,000 in 1986 to Judith Haimes, a psychic who was said to be on good terms with John Milton (1608- 1674). Haimes sued her doctor and a hos- pital, alleging that she suffered an allergic reaction and intense headaches from a dye used in a 1976 cAT scan and as a conse- quence could not use her psychic powers. Paradise lost. The judge set aside the award; the case ground on until it was dis- missed on appeal last February. ~_... ,.: k•.e -notasious ~ . ~~ iN LOS AI~GELE$, at least three -cops who_wetnessed fhe,. beatmg of a~lack motorist last March have f8ed for worker's compensation, claiming that : they suf~ered anxiet'iand stress IN TAMPA, FLORIDA, Dennis Diaz, accused of faiting to pay $30,000 in ch9d support, complained that his right to privacy was violated in 1989, when the state posted his name and photograph along with those of other delinquentfattn:rs. ,- _° . _ ~ CALIFORNU, DonnaRobertsehargedthatavetennaraaeseve iN VE RA, injured fier pet iguana in 1989, she sued for $1 million in damages, contending that the anisufFered a brokenback and that she endured emotional stress. The case 3 is pending IN CANNES, FRANCE, black writer-director Spike Lee, miffed because his film Do the Right Thing did not win first prize at the annual film festival in 1989, implied that the judges' decision was racist. 41N NIARTIh~EEZ, CA~~FOIZ, c rvmembersof U 04~vytra~ill=evei;ed -an antiwar Protester's legs in 1987 sued him, alleging post-traumatic stress disorder. „#--- ..,.- -.. . . .. .. . The pro~ester went on to win a se~lement In his own suit against the government. IN CINCINNATI, OH1O, EdwardH.Wintersuedaiocaihospitalfor"wrongful living." Winter argued that nursing personnel violated his rights when they saved his rife after he experienced an episode of extremely rapid heartbeat-despite his instructions that no such effort should be attempted. Winter died about two years later; a judge last week threw out the case, which had been pursued by Winter's estate. TIME, AUGUST 12,1991 1'7 f.-- -

Nation ~ ~~~~~~ ' J. ~~~/~M~N~"~, T S`~AY AVYAY I N04~ INTHE ~ p~i"~INK N op et~Mri1~ ,qNYWNER~ ~Eil~. NE~ ~~oq D, a ~ ~~ ~ 6ER ~ir B How many ways can crybabies parse shame and blame? In San Francisco last month, a motley flock turned out to picket the classic Disney movie Fantasia. One man complained that the spooky Night on Bald Mountain scene had terrified his child. Members of an organization called Dieters United objected to the tutu-clad hippos frolicking to the music of Dance of the Hours; the protesters felt the sequence ridiculed fat people. Conservationists were appalled at the waste of water in Sorcer•er's Apprentice. Fundamentalist Christians be- wailed the depiction of evolution in Rite of Spring. Antidrug forces suspected some- thing subliminally prodrug in the Nutcrack- er Suite episode featuring dancing mush- rooms. Only Fantasia conductor Leopold Stokowski escaped chastisement, perhaps because he is dead. But not all instances of victimology are so ludicrous. Two men hiding in a New York City subway tunnel were burned when they accidentally touched an electri- fied rail; a jury threw $13 million at them. The city is appealing the award. Joel Stein- berg, the wife beater and child abuser who was convicted in New York City in 1989 of the battering death of his six-year-old ille- gally adopted daughter Lisa, told the court, "I'm a victim, as was everyone else who knew Lisa." a 1 . Far more dangerous is the way dema- gogues have been able to dismiss as no more than "racism" the workings of the U.S. justice system in cases like the no- torious 1987 Tawana Brawley affair. The fragile mechanisms of equity that Ameri- cans have struggled hard to establish-and must still struggle hard to improve-are among the things most threatened by the sweeping fiats of victimology. anguage itself is buckling under the strain of avoiding insult and injury to everybody in response to the cryba- by's complaint. Ever mindful of the genuine or imagined sensit'rvities of women and mi- norities, the University of Missouri's Multi- cultural Management Program has pro- duced for newspaper reporters a 22=page dictionary of loaded words and phrases. Some of the proposals in the lexicon are un- arguable (bimbo and broad are derogatory when applied to women). Other entries, list- ed mainly to pacify various groups, are ques- tionable. Burly should be used with care, since it is "too often associated with large black men, implying ignorance and consid- ered offensive in this context." Articulate could be deemed offensive "when referring to a minority ... and his or her ability to handle the English l anguage."IlZegal alien is unkind, especially to Mexican Americans; 0 ~h111 "the preferred term is undocumented work- er or undocumented resident." The real issue is not that words can hurt, or that civil rights and tolerance are essential in a democracy, but that hypersensitivity clouds rational discourse: how to knit a con- tentious American society together rather than allow it to become balkanized by com- peting interests. "We need to reset the ther- mostats," writes sociologist Etzioni, "not shatter windows or tear down walls. Extrem- ism in defense of virtue is a vice." William Donohue, a sociologist at Pitts- burgh's La Roche College, argues that this same extremism reflects a perverse view of freedom. "Civil liberties means the right of the individual to win against the majority," he says. "But civility and community are both predicated on the individual being sub- ordinate to the interest of society. If you make a fetish of individual rights, you are go- ing to emasculate that community." Perhaps one step toward more civility and community would be a modification of . the famous injunction in Henry VI.• First, let's restrain-not kill-all the lawyers. Then add a second proposal that Shake- speare never had to think of: Let's gag all the crybabies. Better yet, let them gag themselves. -Ite~,ortedby Ann Biackman/Washington, Tom Curry/Chkago and Edwin M. Reingold/Los Angeles TIME, AUGUST I2,1991 18

, , 1 Nation ACCUSATIONS Busybodies: New Puritans Repent! The hour of the meddlers is at hand! And they are putting other Americans' views, behavior and even jobs at increasing risk. By JOHN ELSON Consider, for a moment, these twin signs of our scrambled times: • In Los Angeles, Jesse Mercado was dis- missed from his job as a security guard at the Times despite an excellent perfor- mance record. The reason? Mercado was overweight. •In Wabash, Ind., Janice Bone lost her job as an assistant payroll clerk at the Ford Me- ter Box Co. The reason? The firm, which will not let its employees smoke either on the job or at home, insisted that she take a urine test, which proved positive for nicotine. Welcome, readers, to the prying side of America in the 1990s. The U.S. may still be the land of the free, but increasingly it is also the home of dedicated neo-Puritans, humorlessly im- posing on others arbitrary (mean- ing their own) standards of be- havior, health and thought. To a number of concerned observers,. the busybodies- conformity seekers, legal nitpickers and politically correct thought police-seem to have lost sight of a bedrock American vir- tue: tolerance, allowing others, in the name of freedom, to do things one disagrees with or does not like, provided they do no out- right harm to others. "There should be limits to what we are prepared to tolerate," says president Ste- phen Balch of the National Association of Scholars, based in Princeton, N.J., which is dedicated to fighting lockstep leftism in ac- ademia. "But in a free society where peo- ple are going to get along, those limits have to be pretty wide." Balch is concerned that the very definition of tolerance is changing: more and more people see it as "requiring others to do the kinds of things that they consider enlightened." On many campus- es, the prevailing standard these days would appear to be that of Marxist philos- opher Herbert Marcuse, a guru for many flower-power youths during the rebellious IN LAWRENCEVILLE, GA., police officer Robbie Smith, 25, was removed-=, from his patrol duties and exiled to a dispatch unit last May because a "heavy metal" tattoo on his forearm was said to portray the wrong Image for an officer. IN SANTAANA, CALIF., Helen Garrett, 51, kissed a male friend good- night on the steps of her condominium home and the next day received a notice from the condo association saying she was "seen parking In circular driveway kissing and doing bad things for over 1 hour." The note warned of a possible fine If she repeated the infraction. Witnesses had confused Garrett and friend with two parking teens. IN OLYMPIA, WASH., Senator James West, a Republican, last year introduced a bill in the Washington state legislature that would have made sexual Intercourse ilfegal for unmarried teens under 18. The legislature's senate health care and corrections committee gave the restrictive bill serious consideration as an AIDS- prevention measure. IN BENNINGTON, VT., writer Edward Hoagland was fired from his teaching job at Bennington College after students expressed outrage over three sentences he published in an Esquire article that they thought reflected anti-gay notions. The administration reinstated Hoagiand last month. IN ARAPAHOE COUNTY, COLO., the sheriff's department will hire only non- smokers and forbids its few remaining smokers to light up anywhere on the job, even while out on a case. IN LEBANON, TENN., the Cracker Barrel Old Country Store and Restaurant chain briefly adopted a policy ousting employees who failed "to demonstrate normal heterosexual values." At least nine gay workers were fired before the company rescinded the rule a few weeks later. 20 TIME, AUGUST 12, 1991 '60s. In his dense treatise One-Duriensional Man, Marcuse argued that tolerance for the expression of intolerant attitudes, like racial discrimination, should be repressed for society's good. One key battleground in the tolerance war is life-style. These days, smoking, drinking or noshing on high-cholesterol snacks isn't just a health risk. It can endan- ger your job as well. Concerned about the ever rising (about 15% annually) cost of health insurance, at least 6,000 U.S. com- panies, including Atlanta-based Turner Broadcasting, refuse to hire smokers, and in some cases fire those who don't beat the habit, even when it is only practiced off the job. For similar insurance reasons, cor- porate discrimination against the over- weight is so widespread that some of the obese have formed a lobbying group called the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. Meanwhile, corporate busybodies are ingeniously finding new things to ban-all in the interest, naturally, of slimming health-care costs. One company in Penn- sylvania, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, has barred its managers from riding motorcycles: too risky. A Georgia firm has warned its employees to stay away from such life-threatening activi- ties as cliff climbing and surfing. Civil libertarians concede that compa- nies have a right, not to mention a moral obligation to shareholders, to protect themselves from ruinous medical bills. But some critics argue that the punitive firings of Mercado and Bone represent a throw- back to the early 1900s, when spies from the Ford Motor Co.'s notorious Sociologi- cal Department invaded autoworkers' homes to search for forbidden booze or unmarried live-ins. (Ford's Big Brother ap- proach was intended partly to protect its employees from Detroit's legions of prosti- tutes and grifters, who preyed on the kind of ill-educated new immigrants who often worked on the assembly lines.) A counterargument is that if society re- quires corporations to pay for most of work- ers' health-care costs, society cannot object if those companies intrude on employee life-styles. But as Lewis Maltby of the A.C.L.u. notes, the question then becomes, Where do you draw the line? It is generally legal for a company to declare its workplace a smoke-free environment and punish vio- laters. How, though, can a corporation or government agency demand that employ-

i ees like Bone refrain from lighting up away from work, especially since smoking itself is not a crime? High cholesterol levels can lead to heart disease and other health prob- lems. But what right does an employer have to demand that a worker refrain from eat- ing fried chicken or ice cream? "The only thing that should be consid- ered is job performance," says law profes- sor Irwin Schmerinsky of the University of Southern California. "If the courts allow firms to make decisions on potential costs, it's hard to know where the restrictions will end." Most Americans appear to endorse that view. According to a poll by the Na- tional Consumers League, 81% of Ameri- cans believe an employer has no right to re- fuse to hire an overweight person and 76% feel companies should not be allowed to ban smoking off the job. The nation's lawmakers are beginning to listen: 19 states, including New Jersey, Colorado and Oregon, have passed some form of legislation that bars employers from discriminating against workers because of their life-style. (Despite Indiana's new smoker-protection law, Bone has not got her former job back, and has filed a claim against the company. Overweight Mercado sued, won and got a judgment of more than $500,000, plus a return to his old post.) The corporate life-style police are at TIME, AUGUST 12.1991 least motivated by real financial concerns. All too often, other life-style busybodies are motivated by sheer bloody-minded- ness. A persistent neo-Prohibitionist move- ment has added to the woes of the nation's wine industry by pressuring the Treasury's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms into demanding ever more prominent and explicit health-warning labels on bottles. (One irate California publicist responded by labeling some Lake County Cabernet Sauvignon "Chateau le Warning" and put- ting the Surgeon General's injunctions right up front. The BATF was not amused.) Then there are the animal-rights zeal- ots, who sometimes seem to have greater 21

respect for fauna than for their fellow hu- mans.ln some bastions of correct thinking, a woman wearing an ermine coat stands more chance of being attacked by an egg- throwing lover of stoats than by a mugger. (The fur-wearing woman's offense would be compounded if she were eating a veal sandwich or carrying a non-biodegradable Styrofoam container of coffee.) More than anyone else except the French, Americans have been infected by the delusion that strict laws are necessary to protect people from themselves. The na- tion's statute books are crammed with mil- lions of useless and largely unenforceable regulations, like the one in Seattle that bars flu sufferers from going out in public. Most of the rules are ignored, but their ex- istence is a constant source of inspiration to the puritanically minded. Y et perhaps out of frustration that serious crime seems to be leaping out of control, some guardians of the law have taken to enforcing these ju- ridical minutiae with singular determina- tion. Consider Cobb County, Ga., where serious crimes like robbery have increased since 1990. The Wall Street Journal report- ed last week that Rebecca Anding of Mari- etta was arrested, handcuffed and forced to spend six hours in jail on Easter Sunday. Anding, who had no previous criminal rec- ord, was apprehended picking tulips from an office park to place on her grandmoth- er's grave. Another Marietta resident, Lin- da Judson, spent four hours in jail in May after she was apprehended for failing to re- turn two overdue rental tapes to a local video store. Finally, of course, there are the aca- demic enforcers of political correctness, or "p.c.," whose efforts have received wide- spread publicity but who remain, in many_, cases, undaunted. In Vermont the distirt- guished essayist Edward Hoagland wa.~abruptly dismissed as a part-time lecturer_. at Bennington College. The reason? Stu- dent activists convinced school authorities that an article Hoagland had written for Esquire, in which he argued that the spread of AIDS was owing partly to a "gale of often icy promiscuity," was homophobic and therefore deserved severe punishment. To be sure, Hoagland got his teaching job at Bennington back after an investigation showed that the college's literature depart- ment had "deviated from proper recruit- ment procedures" in giving him the boot. Nonetheless, there is a chilling effect. "Es- sayists have always been unpopular be- cause they think for themselves," Hoag- land told the Boston Globe. "I don't think the gravity of this issue has sunk in. Nation- wide and at Bennington, I don't think the lesson's been learned." Hardly a week goes by without some new example of attempts to enforce con- formity on campus. At the California State University at Northridge, an offer by the Carl's Jr fast-food chain to install a branch in the newly expanded bookstore was re- jected last May. The reason was not the quality or price of the chow but student and faculty objections to the conservative views of the chain's owner, Carl Karcher, who financially supports antiabortion groups such as the National Right to Life Action League. To Stephen Balch, North- ridge's decision was outrageously intoler- ant. "You're not talking about Karcher do- ing anything on campus," he says. "You're not even talking about anything the fast- food chain did as a corporation. You're talking about something its owner did, cer- tainly something he has a right to do, and something that a public institution should certainly not penalize people for." The weary truth is that busybodyness is, as black radical H. Rap Brown once said of violence, as American as cherry pie. The Puritans, who began it all, had "a desperate and intolerant wish to cleanse the world of its impurities," editor Lewis Lapham of Hatper's has written, and their ambition was to build a New Jerusalem on earth de- spite all of life's uncertainties. In both spir- itual and secular guise, that has been a re- curring theme in U.S. history, from the Great Awakening of the early frontier days to the noble experiment of Prohibition. To sociologist James Jasper of New York University, today's would-be censors and neo-Puritans belong to two disparate groups. One consists of those, frequently working class in origin, who feel their sta- tus threatened by differing life-styles- hence their hostility to drugs and casual sex and their sympathy for the goals of decen- cy-obsessed media baiters like the Rev. Donald Wildmon or Senator Jesse Helms. The other group, Jasper says, consists of cause-oriented activists, such as animal rightists and environmentalists, who are in- tent on making people think about the consequences of letting endangered -spe- cies die out or contaminating the atmo- sphere with hair spray. Both groups have contributed to what sociologist Jack Douglas of the University of California at San Diego calls "a degree of self-centered moralism that is unprece- dented in American history." Douglas worries whether the pendulum will ever notes, the new forms of personal intolerance oc- cur at a time when the common bonds of U.S. society-our shared val- ues, our political under- standings-seem weaker than ever. "Maybe," he glooms, "America is too large and diverse to be one country under de- mocracy any longer." Even those who reject Douglas' per- spective might reasonably conclude that the long war against the busybodies has to be won-if it is to be won-a skirmish at a time, tiny battles at the perimeter of individual privacy and choice. One hero in this ongoing conflict is Teresa Fischette, 38, a ticket agent for Continental Airlines at Boston's Logan International Airport. Eager to establish a new image for its ground personnel, the carrier last May de- creed that its female ticket agents must wear makeup. Fischette refused, was fired, but was then offered a job where she would not be in contact with customers. No way: Fischette filed suit. With the case gaining national publicity, Continental gave Fis- chette her job back (with back pay) and shaded back its new cosmetics code to a guideline. No hard feelings, Continental. But we say, Hats off to her! -Reportedby Ann Blackman/Washtngton and Sophfronia Scott Gregory/New York, with bureau reports swing back the other way. ~,'rr Among other things, he TIME, AUGUST 12,1991 22