FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 27. 1985 THE SUN 13A Opinion Commentary Rainbow Warrior A Dread Calculation J) msm Washington. NOT for the first time, political writers have all but ignored the national significance of a story right under their noses. Consider. The Democratic Party is the more liberal of our two major parties.
Several weeks ago. this more liberal party held a primary election for mayor in what is often called the most liberal city in Ameri- Boston. THE images are all around us. Some of them are bewildering, others bemusing. But they are scenes from the risky business of everyday living.
In California, a family cuts back on sugar in the decaffeinated coffee Old Days, New Days By Ben Wattenberg By Ellen Goodman neo-conservative Rainbow Coalition." What's going on here? Well, of course. Mr. Koch was the incumbent. He raised much more money for his campaign than his opponents raised for theirs. He's been a good mayor.
He's an irrepressible personality. All that helps. But his main opponent, Ms. Bellamy, was no unknown. She raised about a million dollars.
She received plenty of free media publicity in the media capital of the world. There were five public debates. Mr. Koch could have been seriously challenged if only one condition had been met: if the voters disagreed with him. If the voters had disagreed with his views, there would have been electoral profit to be made by attacking all his alleged neo-conservative hard-line sins.
The fact that such a campaign never successfully materialized should give us a clue about the status of the old knee-jerk liberalism. Clue: It is deader than a doornail. It should be remembered that the "new politics" strain of liberalism began in the overheated political climate of New York and had real strength for a while. But today, even liberal constituencies don't support the sort of liberalism that is seen to be soft on crime, pro-quotas, pro-welfare-giveaways, pro-militant feminism. As a New York observer with a harsh but alliterative way with words put it to me: "The limousine liberal, lemming left was liquidated." Although the political press largely ignored the meaning of the election, the Koch victory should send a message no longer a new one to the national Democratic Party.
The message is: The old days are over. Either accommodate the party to a more hard-headed, common-sense sort of progressive thinking, Koch-style, or kiss it goodbye as a potent national party. After all, if liberals can't even carry liberals anymore, who can they carry? Chicago. THE FRENCH government plotted the death of Fernando Per-eira. the father of two children.
5 and 8 years old. His only offense was a concern for the environment. The French may say they did not mean deliberately to kill anyone just sink the ship Rainbow Warrior. But there were 14 people on the ship when the first explosion oc- By Garry Wills curred, and Mr. Pereira, a photographer, was killed by the second one when he stayed to rescue his camera and film.
The rest of the people on board had to abandon notes, letters, photographs and other belongings to save their lives. No one could know how many explosions would occur, or that the first explosion might not kill the passengers. The French frogmen did their work well. They murdered effectively. Revolting as the crime is, it has one aspect that offers hope for those who lost a friend, a father, their belongings, their boat.
We often hear -that peace protest is useless, ineffec- tual, wasted labor. That must not be the case when a government fears the peacemakers so much as to murder them. These people were disrupting the spread of contamination by nuclear tests. They were making effective war on war. The powers of the earth had to make war on peace.
Greenpeace, the organization that owned the sunken Rainbow Warrior, has conducted many missions in the cause of the environment, especially in the Pacific. The ship itself had participated In one of those just before it was attacked. It had made four 20-hour journeys in 12 days, carrying 320 people, 15 tons of equipment, $12,000 worth of medical supplies, to transfer the entire population of Rongelap Island to Mejato Island in the Marshalls. Rongelap was one of the atolls contaminated by the test- ca. New York.
It is a city heavy with allegedly liberal voting groups blacks, Hispanics, Jews, activist women. Liberal party, liberal city, liberal constituencies. In addition, two of the three candidates in the primary were clearly liberals: the City Council president, Carol Bellamy, and Herman Farrell, a black assemblyman. The third candidate in this contest In a liberal party, in a liberal city, with liberal constituencies was the Incumbent mayor, Ed Koch. Mayor Koch, oddly enough, is often described as a neo-conservative.
In New York, Mr. Koch has been pummejed by liberals for eight years now as being too tough on crime and too harsh on minority and women's issues. He has been accused of "polarizing" the city. He has even been attacked for being too hard-line on foreign policy issues; in New York, everyone, including the mayor, is allowed to have a foreign policy. So who won the race in liberal- Christopher Blng more than 3 to 1 among female voters.
He swept the votes of those who describe themselves as liberals. He also won by a landslide in Manhattan, which Is the most liberal borough in the most liberal city with the most liberal constituencies, in the more liberal party. In the words of Richard Scam-mon, America's premier elections analyst, Mr. Koch put together "a ism's capital city? Why, the neo-conservative, Ed Koch. Not only did he win it, he got almost two-thirds of the votes! He got more than three times the number of votes as his closest competitor.
According to an NBC exit poll, he got about as many black votes as the black candidate, and carried the Hispanic vote by 3 to 1. He beat feminist Carol Bellamy by Power and the Press THE PRESS these days is besieged by angry politicians, media buccaneers and an irate public. Newsgathering organizations are criticized for their over-zealous coverage of sensitive events such as the TWA hostage-taking or When a government fears the peacemakers so much as to murder them. These are not happy times for the press. The legal and political challenges pile up.
It gets harder to fight for substance vs. the "packaging" of news. Yellow journalism is back in slightly more respectable form, fed by TV and print thrill-merchants. But while serious newspeople daily lose battles to the counting house mentality they may yet win the war. Given time and direction, Journalists can tackle any story of government and make it interesting.
Indeed, the press today is on the threshold of an era in reporting that could advance our understanding of government even more dramatically than the leap from "objectivity" to interpretation did a quarter of a century ago. The watchdog could spur a new interest in government. By getting us all to think more about how it works and debate reforms, the press would keep officials more conscious that they are being watched. We would be wrenched out of our political cynicism: it would not be unheard of to believe in, and expect, higher standards of public service. More of us would feel a part of the system.
Mr. Wolfson, professor of communication at American University, is author of the forthcoming "The Untapped Power of the Press." bate about how to change it. if change is needed. Right now, more often than not we are confused by news of Washington and intimidated by its mysteries. Not that the press doesn't give us explanations.
We know more than ever about public problems, from the state of the economy and national defense to the social costs of poverty and racism. We hear about official ineptness and pocket-padding. Newspapers and TV have forsaken the old sterile "objectivity" that often left the press little more than a mouthpiece for official pronouncements or, worse still, victim of a Joe McCarthy who could exploit the media's weaknesses. We get a lot more news of government now, every day, every hour, even every minute. But that is the problem.
We feel battered by events yet no more certain we are getting at the truth about government than we did in McCarthy's day. Washington remains a place off in the mists where arcane political battles are fought in our name, and where people do terrible things to us over which we seem to have little control. The news media as a whole are uncertain about whether they want to shock people with breaking news or explain government to them. They tend to cover government as an event not as a process. We need to know how the system works.
Why does government do what it does? How do they put together policy in the White House? What can Congress accomplish and what is beyond it? What shapes our local congressman's behavior? What's behind what bureaucrats say? Do their programs solve problems or create new ones? Why do special interests so often win out these days? Who in Washington speaks for the broad public interest? The press should keep chipping away with exposes of the $700 hammers and CIA-planned invasions. But it also should keep government accountable in other ways. It should tell us more about the processes that produce the bills, votes and programs, help us appraise the performance of all federal officials president, congressman or faceless bureaucrat. Show us, and officials, where they may be caught up In a system that ought to be changed. The news media have the resources and expertise to do such reporting.
It is a press cliche that such "dull stuff' about government will only put readers and viewers to sleep; yet bellwether news organizations already are doing "process" stories, and they know how to make them both eye-catching and informative. Yesterday's "dull" stuff about economics or government regulation or foreign affairs suddenly Is today's front page news. By Lewis W. Wolf son the president's health. They worry about the tightening of government controls over information and about court rulings that constrict their freedom to report.
Within the news media there is heated debate about ways to answer critics and explain the legitimacy of press practices to show that while the press may not be loved, it is still needed. There is less debate about the news media's biggest challenge, which may also be their best opportunity to silence critics. The test lies not in coping with the chill of libel judgments or containing Jesse Helms. But it goes to the heart of the reason for a free press. The question is how effective a watchdog of government have the news media been.
We expect the press to be the "bible of democracy," as Walter Lipp-mann wrote to explain how the system works, help us judge government's effectiveness and spur de they drink in their house on the San Andreas fault. In Pennsylvania, a man goes Jogging with the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor as a backdrop In Maine, a woman rides to aerobics class on her motorbike without a helmet. A friend decides that, after the recent crop of air crashes, he will only fly in emergencies. He explains this earnestly, while chain-smoking cigarettes. Another friend drinks only bottled water these days, eats only meat untouched by steroids, and spends weekends hang-gliding.
In some peculiar way, each of us assesses risks with a different calculator and determines his own personal safety. As private citizens we all live now as if we were working for some vast national life-insurance company. Day by day, issue by issue, bulletin by bulletin we rewrite our own Preferred Risk policy. The most recent and most emotional scenes of public risk-assessing happen now on the front lines of the AIDS story. Watching the parents demonstrating against one school and then another for allowing an AIDS victim into their child's building, I couldn't help wondering how many packed up their picket signs in the back seat, their children in front and drove away without buckling the seat belts.
How do any of us make assessments? What part is reason? What part is fear? What part do statistics play? What part emotions? The AIDS story is a ripe way to look at how we handle and mishandle risk. It is a case study of sorts, if that is not too cool a phrase for such a terrible disease. It's a tale about experts and the public, about the gap between our skepticism and our longing for certainty. Not that long ago, when Edmund Muskie was looking for facts about the relationship between pollution and health, he asked for a "one-armed" scientist who didn't always say, "On the one hand this, on the other hand that." Last week in New York, parents grilled doctors for absolute promises that their children could not "catch" AIDS by, for example, being bitten. Instead, they got qualifications: "I consider it unlikely." In dealing with the experts, the public wants guarantees and is offered probabilities.
There are two cultures at work in risk-assessment, and more sensibilities. As an article in October's Science '85 magazine points out, there are times when the public pays scant attention to major risks and times when even a small risk is too big to be accepted. Our attitudes are much more complicated than the numbers. Last year, for example, 45,000 Americans died in car accidents, half of whom would be alive if they'd worn seat belts. On the other hand, not a single medical person caring for AIDS patients has come down with the disease.
Yet the fear of holding the hand of a person with AIDS may far outweigh the fear of driving. As the Science '85 writer explains, "We may be much more willing to accept higher risks in activities over which we have control, such as smoking, drinking, driving or skiing, than things over which we have little control, such as industrial pollution, food additives, and commercial airlines." Or surely, AIDS. In dealing with public attitudes, we can't discount dread from the risk equation. Certainly not in talking of AIDS. The odds of an AIDS cataclysm on the scale of medieval plagues may be small, but we always weigh heavily the smallest chance of any massive disaster.
It is dread that tips the scales of statistical logic. None of us knows yet where the argument about the dangers of AIDS will lead. There is a part of us that remains open to Information. We do quit smoking or try to; we do pass mandatory seat belt laws. In the latest Harris survey, fewer than one-third of us still believe that AIDS can be caught by casual contact.
Our anxiety may indeed follow statistics, the path of the disease, up or down. Out I have the sense that there will be chilling arguments ahead of us. This is, after all, a country that bans saccharin and builds nuclear bombs. We argue and will go on arguing about risk in two different languages: numbers and emotions, odds and anxieties. ing of 66 U.S.
nuclear weapons in the 1940s and 1950s. Its natives had greatly increased rates of leukemia, thyroid cancer, miscarriages and retardation. They wanted to escape their doomed island, by the ghosts of our technological triumphs. The Rainbow Warrior accomplished that for them, and was sailing to prevent further pollution of the atmosphere when it was sunk. France, even with its Socialist government, wants to follow America's lead into the future and, like us, it will climb there even over dead bodies.
The French government paid a lot of money to destroy the Rainbow Warrior. No wonder so many were willing to pay a little money to replace it. The courage of those who sailed the replacement is beyond admiration. The danger to which they are exposed is the measure of nuclear warriors' fear. Genghis with an 'h' New York.
DON'T BELIEVE what they're telling you about the Fifties. I was there, and It wasn't anything like they say it was. There were not a lot of wonky little guys with bow ties running around. Not many at all. Also, people were not complacent.
Speaking for myself, I was always on the alert for wonky By Calvin Trillin hairsplitting among graduate students, but that's not the way I took it. I took it as an indication that even these Fifties college people, most of them not from Missouri and a significant number of them not bubble gum hoarders, were not certain that Homer had actually existed. If Homer's up for grabs and Shakespeare had always been iffy, I asked them, how could they be so sure about Chaucer? There were people who accused me of being a Philistine for saying things like that. It's no fun being called a Philistine, of course, but it hurts a lot less if you happen to be a person who is not absolutely certain that a Near Eastern people called the Philistines definitely existed. The only difference between me and those people who think they have no Missouri tendencies Is where we draw the line which historical figure is the earliest one we're absolutely dead certain about.
Now we're coming down to it. Here goes. George Washington. Mine is George Washington. I'm sure he existed.
After all, they've got his teeth. I'm not saying that historical figures before George Washington didn't exist; I'm merely saying that I wouldn't cross my heart about them. I'm pleased that Washington is my man partly because he was known in his day as a Forties person. In the Eighteenth Century, as It happens, being a Forties person had pretty much the same connotation as being a Fifties person does today. People in the 1740s eschewed complacency and often did the samba.
Significantly, none of the portraits of George Washington show him In a bow tie. Calvin Trillin writes a column for The Nation. I think that even people who aren't from Missouri believe a lot less history than they let on. Take a little matter like believing that historical figures actually existed. How many people believe that, say, Genghis Khan existed? Everyone? Walt a minute.
I don't mean simply believing that there must have been somebody leading those Mongol hordes and that Genghis Khan sounds like the right sort of name for a horde leader and that if it wasn't precisely Genghis Khan it was a series of horde leaders with names that amount to the same thing in translation. I don't mean simply assuming that Genghis Khan must have existed because everybody's always talking about him and you always see him in those horde movies with bad dubbing. I mean believing that he definitely existed believing it In a way that would allow you to give the sort of assurance we Forties people usually express as "cross my heart and hope to die." I mean believing that there was a man who lived from 1167 to 1227, that he led Mongol hordes and that he was so particular about his name being Genghis Khan that any scribe who handed him a proclamation that left the out of Genghis (a common error In those days) could count on being added to the evening's shish kebab. Now 1 think I see some hands being lowered in the back of the room. When I was In college that was in the Fifties, but I was already set in my ways there was a widespread academic Joke about a graduate student at Princeton having written his doctoral dissertation on the proposition that the Odyssey and the Iliad were not written by Homer but by a blind Greek of the same name.
The Joke was told as a comment on ists are almost always wrong. During what they're always calling the Turbulent Sixties, for instance, my Uncle Harry hardly moved off the porch. The only decade they aren't wrong about Is the first decade of the century, and that's only because they have never said anything about it. They haven't said anything about It because they don't know what to call It. You can't talk about the Turbulent Single Digits.
I know what the decadlsts would say if they heard me talking this way. They'd say, "That just shows what a Fifties person he is." That just shows how much they know. I'm not a Fifties person; I'm a Forties person. The decadlsts always assume that everyone acquired his style from the decade of his college years, but as it happens. I acquired my style in elementary school.
If you don't believe that. Just look at the people who went to Hale H. Cook Grade School, in Kansas City, Missouri, during the Forties. There's something there. We're not turbulent and we don't drink bathtub gin and we're not complacent.
We're more lik people were in the Single Digits, except, of course, that we hoard bubble gum and nylons. It may be that my being from Missouri has something to do with my reluctance to believe anything about anything I didn't see with my own eyes. Missouri Is the Show Me State. I don't know why. Once, when I was back there, I tried to find out the origin of the name, but every time someone offered an Idea of how It must have come about, everyone else In the conversation started saying things like "Oh.
c'mon!" and "Show me the evidence for that" and "Tell it to your grandma!" That's the way things are In Missouri. little guys with bow ties, and whenever I ran across one, I was not afraid to tell him that the presence of too many people of his sort would give the decade an enduring reputation for welrdness. So I don't know where they get all this complacent business. I suspect that nothing they tell you about the Twenties is true, either. I wasn't there, so I can't say for sure.
My Uncle Harry was, though, and he has assured me that it wasn't anything like they say it was. For Instance, my Uncle Harry never met any flappers. We're talking now about a man who was there the entire time. This is not a person who walked into the Twenties late. This is not a person who ducked out to get some popcorn in 1928 and failed to return.
My Uncle Harry was there for the long haul, and he never laid eyes on a flapper. He never had any bathtub gin, either; he didn't even have a bathtub. Uncle Harry doesn't know where they got all this bathtub gin business. I don't know what the Gay Nineties were like, but I suspect they were dour. The decad-.
