VOLUME 2, NO. 7 MARCH 1994 $2.50

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1 VOLUME 2, NO. 7 MARCH 1994 $2.50 I know it is going to be a distinctive academic experience when the woman who answers the door at the suburban San Diego house tells me to leave my shoes at the door. I paid $7 to join this "Mark Group" and am not sure what to expect. Some guy is practically dry-humping a woman on the couch, although the pair attract little attention. Other couples are engaging in spontaneous massage, but it remains uncertain who had come with whom. I keep hearing the phrases: "doing" someone and "getting done by." I sit across from a robust woman who looks like Tip O'Neill. Men outnumber women by a small margin. A woman who describes herself as "a healer, an actress and a travel agent" says that this is not usually the case in the Mark Groups. We go around the room for introductions, which sometimes digress into short autobiographies, the ages run from about 25 to over 60. There are five masseuses, many real estate people, some brokers and copier salesmen, and one guy with a charter bus business. When asked why she came, a woman in a tight pink sweater responds: "To get turned on." Others say they wanted to meet people and have fun. "I had nothing else to do," one man volunteers, "and this is better than watching LA Law." On the coffee table lays a book on how to lose weight during sex. Another elegant volume looks like it might contain Ansel Adams's prints of Yosemite, but inside are Mapplethorpe-like photos of genitalia, Asian women doing their best Deep Throat imitations, and naked people probing each other's orifices in creative ways. Finally, an ostensible leader of the gathering a man named Aubry with limp hair and an overbite introduces himself and announces the first game: mimicry. People pair off, and one member of each pair has to immediately repeat everything the other says. This, explains Aubry, "will help you focus attention Lies, Damn Lies & Left-Wing Statistics WHY JOANIE CAN'T ADD by PAUL MULSHINE Certain questions are hard to face for us beleaguered white males. We don't want to consider the real reason, for instance, why women and minorities do worse than we do on standardized tests such as the SAT. We hide behind the easy excuse: the test is culturally biased. This is the easy way out, and like most easy ways out, it is not true. The test isn't biased. It is mathematics itself that is biased. Only in a male-dominated, Eurocentric world would two plus two always have to equal four. Always! There's no room for discussion, no area for compromise. Just the same rigid answer, day after day. This is exactly the sort of system you'd expect a white male to set up. Why, just look at the number one! It's the very first number men invented, and what's it shaped like? All straight and rigid and pointy like that? I rest my case. Math is unfair. It's time we started to raise consciousness about the need to make mathematics more flexible. We need to get rid of the ludicrous idea ' that there's just one "correct" answer to every math problem. We need to soften and, yes, feminize math. This is, of course, a ludicrous proposal, but if I were to write a book on this theme under a female pen name, perhaps with a picture of a lesbian in a muumuu on the back cover, I'd have a best-seller. Let's face it: Women hate math. Not all women, just the type of women who end up as militant feminists and, for that matter, the type of foggy-brained on the other person and help you grow." The starting phrase is: "The last time I felt really free was..." For a minute or so the room sounds like a Pentecostal church meeting at full velocity. Afterwards Aubry asks how people liked it. A few hands go up. Who didn't like it? A rather faded middle-aged woman named Angela raises a hand, "I thought it sucked," she says in a raspy voice. Aubry announces the rules for the next game, "hot seat." The person so designated must answer all questions, as long as people raise their hands and say thank you. "Are you rich?" someone asks a man who claims he took pictures of one girl beside his Rolls Royce. "Not really," he says. "Depends what you consider rich." Someone asks an athletic looking man in a cutoff football jersey why he broke up with his girlfriend. "She said I was conceited, self-centered, and narcissistic," he explains, "but I'm really a naturally loving and giving person." "How big are your chest and biceps?" someone else asks. He has no idea. Then someone asks about the size of another appendage. "Twenty-seven inches," he replies. "Ouch!" says Angela, the faded middle-aged woman who thought mimicry sucked and who, during the introductions, described herself as a "swinger." Then Mr. Jock explains: "Twenty-seven inches from the floor." Turn to page 12 males who support them. The book I envision let's title it "Divide and Conquer: How Men Use Mathematics to Oppress Women" could actually perform a service for all those closet arithmephobes in the feminist movement. Until now, radical feminists have had to hide their hostility to math. Take the famous Barbie incident. The Mattel Toy Co. produced a talking Barbie doll that said, among other things, "Math class is tough!" Feminists complained that this perpetuated an unfair stereotype of women. Mattel promptly did to Barbie what the Sandinistas used to do to La Prensa. This led the executive director of the American Association of University Women, Turn to page 10

2 Dear Sirs, With horror I realized my subscription had run its course and I had been subsidized for the last couple of copies. How American of me. With the enclosed cheek I abdicate my position in the welfare state. I read your publication from cover to cover but your Communiques section is my favorite. The vitriolic vituperations of your non-admirers (does that make you Admirer Impaired?) are quite funny. I still laugh about the letter stained with the author's menstrual fluid. In the vernacular of a few years ago, "Keep on keepin' on." Yours truly, James F. Howell III Dear Bigots, Is this too PC for you? Your thinly disguised hatred and intolerance are shameful. I use your paper (along with quotes from Rush Limbaugh) in my critical thinking classes. Thanks for providing me with good examples of why we need legislation and PC language to protect us. unsigned In the January issue of Heterodoxy, you slandered Nietzsche by asserting that he was one of the intellectual godfathers of Communism and Nazism. In fact, Nietzsche severely criticized socialism, anti- Semitism and German nationalism. Here are two quotations that demonstrate this. The first is from Human All Too Human, section 473 (1878): "Socialism can serve to teach, in a truly brutal and impressive fashion, what danger there lies in all accumulations of state power, and to that extent to implant mistrust of the state itself. When its harsh voice takes up the watchword 'as much state as possible' it thereby at first sounds noisier than ever: but soon the opposite cry through with all the greater force: 'as little state as possible.' " The next quotation is from The Gay Science, section 377 (1887): "No, we do not love humanity; but on the other hand we are not nearly "German" enough, in the sense in which the word "German" is constantly being used nowadays, to advocate nationalism and race hatred and to be able to take pleasure in the national scabies of the heart and blood poisoning that now leads the nations of Europe to delimit and barricade themselves against each other as if it were a matter of quarantine." Lawrence J. Tyburski Dravosburg, PA As the Libertarian Party candidate for governor of the (not so) great State of California, I find myself buried in books, budgets and arcane publications that I simply must read to make me an effective spokesman for my party. Unfortunately, I can't stop reading your publication as well. Frankly, I love your irreverent style and PC attacks. It's wonderful how you can make me laugh while at the same time increasing my disdain for the statists on the left. Lloyd Billingsley is my favorite columnist. Even though your investigations do not always directly fit into my political philosophy or deal with the fruitcake politics of my state, I find I devour each edition. Then each issue gets recycled to my friends. I can't spare the time to read Heterodoxy, but I can't live without my monthly fix. As my dealer in zany rightwing diatribes, you simply must keep my drug of choice coming. Please! For freedom, Richard Rider Your January 1994 issue carried a story and photos about Pasadena. Paragraph 11 of the story is inaccurate. The creation of a Latino roundtable and the naming of a Latino managing editor of the Pasadena Star-News had nothing to do with the events described in paragraphs 7 through 9. I explained this to the writer twice before publication, but the story was still published, inaccurately and out of context. This is a request for a correction to set the record Further, at least two of the photographs (see enclosure) are Star-News photos. Your publication did not obtain permission from the Star-News to publish these photos, nor did you credit the newspaper. This is a formal request for you to set the record straight on this matter. Please advise me of your plans as soon as possible. Very truly yours, Hope Frazier Editor/Vice President Pasadena Star News Editor's Note: We obtained the photos in question from a source other than the Pasadena Star-News and had no intention of denying Star photographers the appropriate credit. Thank you for your fast service sending me copies of your Tailhook issue. I have a personal interest in this story and was pleased to see the accusers shown up for what they are. I look forward to every issue and am very pleased with each one. I am highly offended by the screeching hysteria of your critics guess you must be getting to them. Keep it up. I also wish to take this opportunity to thank an outstanding lady from New York who pointed me in your direction. Keep hammering the collectivist scum. Sincerely, Dave Bruton

3 REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM NOTHING MORE THAN FEELINGS: The spring issue of a strange, little-known magazine, Magical Blend, which is steeped in mysticism, contains a strange article by none other than Vice President Al Gore. Gore's essay, "The Story of the Earth and Us," examines the tension between the Platonic world-view, which emphasizes rationality, and the Aristotelian world-view, which emphasizes feelings, and man's connectedness with nature. Gore, predictably, comes down on the side of feelings, and insists that our high-tech Platonic society is careening toward an apocalyptic collision with the natural world. "... We have believed that a detached intellect could enable us to understand nature and control it," he writes. "But we need to feel as well as think...the scientific revolution seduced us with false promises, with the idea that if we concentrated on the realm of the intellect we could solve all our problems." Also featured in the spring issue of Magical Blend is an article on the distinct differences between male and female sorcerers, and one on lucid dreaming. GOING APE: In the February issue of the popular science magazine, Discover, writer Daniel W. McShea joins the growing chorus of animal rightists who want to extend human rights to apes. McShea notes that even though apes are intelligent and are close kin to humans, some people will argue that humans are somehow special, and deserve greater consideration. "To answer this," he writes, "I suggest a different sort of argument than the one based on intelligence and kinship. The argument for ape rights is based on our concern for our own wellbeing, our own feelings...apes have feelings, but the case for protecting apes doesn't hinge on the damage done to their feelings by maltreatment. Rather it hinges on the damage done to our feelings." To his credit, McShea admits that there are problems ahead, such as whether apes should have rights to property. MY FUNNY VALENTINE: "Girls who love girls and women who love women who love women are OK!!!" On Valentine's Day, members of the Lesbian Avengers distributed that message, attached to pieces of candy, to children between the ages of six and eleven years old at Cowing Elementary School in West Springfield, Massachusetts. The leaflets also included an 800 number offering "hot, uncensored gay phone sex" at $1.98 per minute. School officials threatened to sue but militant sisters remained defiant. "I think it's pretty clear that families and schools do not protect their gay members," said novelist and Lesbian Avengers founder Sarah Schulman, "so the lesbian community has the responsibility to act like a family for gay and lesbian children. SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE: In his best selling novel, Disclosure, Michael Crichton has one of his characters deliver a rant we can only pray remains in the script of the film now being cast: "I'm telling you, it's all bullshit. Like these sensitivity training seminars we all have to go to. Everybody sits there with their hands in their laps like a fucking Red Guard meeting, learning the correct way to address your fellow workers. But afterward everybody goes out and fucks around, the same as they always did. The assistants go, 'Oh, Mr. Jackson have you been to the gym? You look so strong.' Batting their eyelashes. So what am I supposed to do? You can't make rules about this. People get hungry, they eat. Doesn't matter how many meetings they attend. This is all a giant jerk off. And anybody who buys into it is an asshole." NEVER NEVER LAND: The principal and superintendent of a Long Island intermediate school cancelled a children's performance of "Peter Pan" this month because the local Shinnecock Indians might find it offensive, particularly the song "Uhga-Wuhga-Meatball." The editorial staff at The Wall Street Journal put it well: "There's plenty else wrong with the J.M. Barrie play. Feminists won't like it that Peter is guilty of gender bias by barring girls from his Lost Boys Club and by relegating Wendy to a mother role. And of course, the part of Wendy always goes to an actress, which infects impressionable young minds with the notion that being a boy is better than being a girl. Those animal sequences are very troubling. Could animal rights activists condone a play that depicts a dog forced to work as a nanny or makes light of feeding an alarm clock to a crocodile? The school that killed Peter Pan is now considering staging "The Wizard of Oz." Expect protests from the vertically challenged." THE COLOR OF PREJUDICE: A recent Louis Harris poll on racial and ethnic stereotypes in America turned up some interesting data. The results, published in the Chicago Tribune, show that "prejudice knows no color," in the words of Stanley Cloud, President of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Hispanics consider blacks inclined toward crime and violence, and a large number of blacks believe Hispanics lack the drive to succeed and consider Asians unscrupulously crafty and devious in business. When presented with the statement that Roman Catholics "are narrow minded because they are too controlled by their church," for instance, 57% of non-catholic Asian Americans and 49% of non-catholic blacks agreed, as opposed to 34% of non-catholic whites. When given the statement, "When it comes to choosing between people and money, Jews will choose money," 54% of blacks agreed, along with 43% of Hispanics and 34% of Asian Americans, while only 27% of non-jewish whites signed on. Prejudice is indeed a growth industry in America, but not, apparently, in the white community. OLLIE UBER ALLES: Oliver Stone, whose ongoing anti- Americanism bears some striking similarities to the mindless thumping of the Energizer Bunny, has a new one on the drawing boards. It is a movie called "Noreiga," with Al Pacino in the title role. The view of the Panamanian dictator will be "somewhat sympathetic." (The writer on the film, Lawrence Wright, says, "This is a film about Noriega's spiritual journey.") But if the former dictator of Panama can't provide an example of evil for Ollie, American government certainly can. The movie has a sub-plot about Iran-Contra with real bad guys: George Bush and Oliver North. NO BULL FROM MJ: As the Chicago Bulls suffer through a lackluster season without Michael Jordan, the team's new go-to-guy, Scottie Pippen, got annoyed at the fans' booing and accused them of racism, asserting that they had never booed a white player. Asked for a response, Air Jordan slam dunked Pippen, saying that there had been vicious booing of white players during his time on the team: "I know this about Chicago Stadium. The fans want to see good, solid basketball, and if they don't see it, they're going to boo. It doesn't matter what color you are, whether you're black or white or yellow." THEY JUST DON'T GET IT: Khalid Abdul Muhammed, foul-mouthed official of the Nation of Islam, is the Typhoid Mary of black racism, spreading it wherever he goes. Just recently, after the opera bouffe in which Louis Farrakhan pretended to disciple him, Khalid appeared at Howard University. His comments were relatively mild, considering what he had said at New Jersey's Kean University several weeks ago, but his mere presence ignited racism in others. During Khalid's appearance, a student named Malik Zulu Shabazz got up and led the audience in this call and response: Who killed Nat Turner? The Jews! Who controls the Federal Reserve? The Jews! University administrators did not discipline Shabazz, which is laudable. But at least they could have given the foolish young man some ridicule, a corrective he badly needs. GAY FOR VIEW: Gay and lesbian shows are turning up on cable TV. There is also Gay Entertainment Television, a New York-based channel dedicated to gay and lesbian programming which is now carried in five major cities. Our correspondent Turk Richards has come up with a way of putting a "gay slant" on classic straight T.V. programs: DICKIE VAN DYKE-Laura Petrie has been outed as a lesbian; she leaves Rob and her son Ritchie to become the domestic partner of Sally Rodgers. Rob questions his own sexual identity and has a brief affair with Buddy Sorrel, who quickly decides that bisexuality is not for him and returns to his faithful wife Pickles. BRIDGIT LOVES BRIDGIT: Two women from the upper East Side, Bridgit Sullivan and Bridgit Ginsberg meet while on vacation at Fire Island. They fall in love, but find that their in-laws just can't accept having a "mixed marriage" between a Jew and a Shiksa. BARNEY A children's show starring Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, and his former love, prostitute Steven Gobbi. To introduce youngsters to "diverse" relationships, the two men open each show in purple face (after sexual asphyxia) and sing a duet of "I Love You, You Love Me." STUDDS Starring the other gay Congressman from Massachusetts. Gerry treats young House members like he's reading a John Grisham novel as he rapidly moves from page to page. DRAGNET Joe Friday and Officer Gannon go undercover in spiked heels, garter belts and plunging necklines to catch a serial killer preying on prostitutes. QUEEN FOR A DAY Each afternoon, three transvestites tell their tragic stories to a live audience while competing for prizes.

4 PAGE 4 MARCH 1994 Notes of a Sensitivity Training Survivor When I was informed I had been awarded a Graduate Teaching Assistantship in Political Science, I was pleased. But then I read further in the letter and found that part of the requirement of the award was attendance at a "Teaching Effectiveness Workshop." This made my heart fall, especially when I read the sentence in the letter (which was signed by the University of Cincinnati's Associate Vice President for Research and Advanced Studies, Dr. Judith S. Trent) that read: "Attendance at the Workshop is mandatory as a part of your assistantship requirement." I immediately recalled my first work experience at the University of Cincinnati a couple of years earlier. I had been appointed as a Residence Hall Staff Member. This position too required a mandatory "workshop," although in that case it had been billed as a Cultural Diversity Session. Just prior to my Residence Hall sensitivity session (which was held, incidentally, during my very first week on the U.C. campus), returning staff members had given me warnings I didn't quite understand at the time, telling me, "Be careful what you say" and "The thing is to keep your mouth shut." I became concerned enough to approach the Residence Hall Supervisor. In the course of our conversation, I told him that I was new to the university, and that the university I had attended as an undergraduate had very few minority students. The supervisor was very eager to hear my concerns and prodded me for more information about my lack of experience with cultural diversity. As part of our talk, I also discussed the emotionally draining experience of my father's recent death, a mistake I would later regret. The Residence Hall Sensitivity Session began with a "sensitivity facilitator" informing us that all whites were racists and that blacks could not in any circumstances be racist. This black woman stated that white men held all power in society and that they oppressed everyone ethnic minorities, women, homosexuals and the handicapped. Furthermore, she said that the English language, chief weapon of white males, was itself constructed in a manner which makes it oppressive. Anecdotal evidence provided to prove this assertion included phrases such as "good guys wear white, bad guys wear black" and "stuck behind the eight-ball." Additionally, she heavily emphasized terms such as "black-market," "blacklisted," "black sheep" and "blackmail." The facilitator was particularly venomous about "blackmail," because in her bewildering words, "Not only does it attack and denigrate blacks, it also specifies 'black males.' " After her introductory rant, the facilitator divided the participants into two groups by reading their names off a prepared sheet. My group included a white male, "Boris," who was about 7 years older; "Hilda," a self-avowed feminist; "Tracy," a very outspoken "Afro-centrist" woman; and "Thurman," a black male, who like myself was new to the department. The other group included two white males (both had several years of experience in this department and tended to be passive), two white women (one very outspoken and the other very submissive) and a black male who did not stay for the whole session. As the facilitator read off the list of names, she kept looking up at us to associate names with faces. It was obvious upon reflection that she had arranged the groups to provide the object lesson she intended to enforce. By CRAIG T. COBANE II After dividing us up, the facilitator produced something I had not seen since I was about four years old: Tinker Toys. She gave a bag of them to each group and said we were going to play a "game." The rules were simple: the two groups would have 15 minutes to use the Tinker Toys to build the tallest possible freestanding structure. After completing our Tinker Toy structure, we were then to disassemble it entirely and rebuild it, this time without any verbal communication. Before we started our group mapped out a strategy: while we were building the structure during the period in which conversation was allowed, one of the members would draw a sketch of it with directions of how we built it for use during the silent portion of the exercise. Someone asked jokingly who could draw and Hilda volunteered. When we started, my group was sitting at a table which was obviously far too wobbly to support our project. Boris suggested that we move it onto the floor and I agreed. Hilda did not like the idea and said that we were taking the game way too seriously. The two black students made it clear that they could have cared less what we did. It was soon obvious that only Boris and I were working on the structure. The others showed no interest whatsoever, remaining at the wobbly table and looking down condescendingly. When I asked if the rest of the group was going to help, Hilda looked up from her little Tinker Toy sketch and sneered, "let the boys play with their toys." Throughout the endeavor, whenever Boris and I had a disagreement over construction, it always turned out that Boris's idea was superior. (Civil engineering is not my strong point.) Despite the lack of involvement from the rest of the group, however, other than periodic taunts, our structure was built with several minutes to spare. As Boris and I examined the structure, we noticed that near the top we had placed heavier pieces on top of lighter pieces. Boris stated that this would have to be corrected in the final structure. When the facilitator told us to take the structure apart and prepare to build it again in silence, I suggested that Boris should be the leader because he obviously knew the most about the structure. As the second part of the game began, Boris and I worked in silence. Our memories of what we had done were good enough that we did not need to refer back to Hilda's sketch. She watched without much interest until we reached the top of the structure (where the mistake had been) and started to make the correction we had planned. At this point we heard an urgent knocking on the table. It was Hilda glaring disapprovingly at us and agitatedly pointing at her drawing. Observing the rule of silence, Boris attempted to explain why we had improvised by holding the two Tinker Toy pieces in each hand, and then lowering one hand and raising the other like a balance to show that one piece was heavier than the other. I don't know if Hilda ever did understand what Boris was trying to get across, but she did get very angry and crumpled up the drawing and threw it at his face. After our structure was built, I went over to look at the other group's structure, and it was obvious that with the time remaining there was no way that group could build a structure as tall as ours. We were going to win the Tinker Toy contest! With a gesture of exaggerated exaltation, I flashed Boris a triumphant smile and gave a theatrical "thumbs up." When the game was over, the facilitator told us all to return to our seats, further emphasizing the kindergarten atmosphere of the session. She immediately turned to me and asked, "Why are you so happy?" I replied that I was happy because my group had won our structure was taller. She stated coldly that comparing our structure to that of the other group was not part of the exercise. I responded that there was competition implied in the way she set up the exercise. She stated that white males see everything as competition and their only goal is to win at any cost. The facilitator continued to attack me for my pride in having a taller structure. She berated me bitterly for not having made a special effort to include the rest of the group. When I explained that I had tried to get the others in my group to participate but they showed no interest, she interrupted me and said that she did notice my "halfhearted" and "condescending" attempt at getting the nonwhite males in my group to participate and it wasn't good enough. As she noticed my dumbfounded look, she further explained that it is not the oppressed individual's responsibility to become involved, but that it is the oppressor's responsibility to see to the needs of the oppressed. To demonstrate that I personified the oppressive white male, she began to read from notes she had taken while we built the structures and to pose a series of rhetorical questions to the nonwhite males in the session. "How did you feel when the two white males took the structure away from the rest of the group and went to work on it by themselves?" It was typical, the facilitator said, for white males to segregate and exclude other people from "their" projects. "How did you feel when it was obvious that Craig would only listen to Boris and to no one else?" The facilitator then went on to say that young white males are socialized to listen only to older white males. They learn that in the patriarchal family structures. "How did you feel when Craig made Boris the leader of the group without considering anyone else or even discussing the idea with anyone else?" In the white male culture, she stated, only white males can be leaders,

5 HETERODOXY PAGE 5 so it was only natural that I would consider only Boris qualified for leadership. "How did you feel, Hilda, when you tried to point out that the structure was not being built according to 'the plan' and the two white males just ignored you?" Again, the sensitivity facilitator explained that it was normal for white men to discount the ideas and experience of women and minorities or to place them in positions having little power. It was noteworthy that the white males in the group had delegated the secretarial role to the white woman in the group and did not think the two black members worthy of being assigned any task at all. It was all quite absurd, but I couldn't help trying to explain myself. As I tried to talk, the facilitator kept me from finishing my sentences. She continued to single me out and make references to my past, especially the thenrecent death of my father, facts she could only have known if she had been prepped by my Residence Hall Supervisor. At one point, the facilitator invited me to "touch her arm" so I would have the experience of physically contacting a black person. "You do come from an all-white school, don't you?" she taunted. The session descended to its lowest point when she called my deceased father a racist. She made reference to the fact that the death of my father "removed one more racist influence" from my life and stressed the need to "un-teach" all the racist views my family and especially my father had instilled in me. The death of my father, according to her, was not such a bad thing because it made her job of "sensitizing" me easier. I was able to keep my composure throughout the session, but afterwards I broke down. I could not keep the memories of this experience out of my mind as I contemplated the new sensitivity session I would face in becoming a teaching assistant. As I would discover, my wariness over the Graduate Teaching Effectiveness Workshop was well founded. One of the most intimidating sessions of the day was entitled "University: Race and Gender More than Words on Paper." Speaking on behalf of the university, an associate dean of the law school informed me that "some acts are harmful and hurtful even if not illegal." Then the university spokeswoman relayed the following as examples of discriminatory behavior: "dumb blonde jokes" (to be viewed as sex discrimination); calling only on women students in class discussions (because of the intimidation of being singled out); and calling only on white students. There was also (even more subjectively) "not properly reacting to students' answers," which could be seen in a graduate assistant whose reactions included "looking out the window" and "pacing away from the student." These types of "discrimination," according to the law school spokeswoman, sent students "the message of hurt and pain." Another session at the workshop took up the issue of "Appreciating Gender Differences." I was informed that there were many unfounded stereotypes about men and women, among them that men do better in math, are more competitive and are often chosen as leaders in group work, whereas women suffer from "math anxiety" and "favor less competitive classroom projects." Furthermore, I was told that debating is "a male-oriented teaching style" that functions to "give advantage to some." On the basis of these "facts," I was told that I had an obligation to produce "a class where everyone feels comfortable" that was without "white male bias." The topic of yet another session was "Cultural Diversity in Teaching." A sizable portion of this session had to do with learning to say "hello" in Swahili, learning to shake hands like a black man, the importance of having our minds and bodies "purified" and getting us to agree that it was "important not to play with words." Nearly paralyzed by the irony of that last exhortation, I could only admit it was my sentiment exactly. Another session I was required to attend centered on "Feminist Issues in Teaching and Learning." During this session I was informed that "higher education, among other things, is sexist and racist," and that "education is aimed at boys" because "boys are number one." I was also told that "objectivity" is a "non-interactive male value." One of the facilitators in this session then described how she was a "survivor" of the educational system, invoking parallels to being a rape survivor. She stressed to the females in the session the importance of "building an underground support group." While conceding the difficulty of graduate school, I had trouble believing it bore any resemblance to rape or to living in Nazi-occupied France. D uring this session I was also told that in American society you are "privileged if you have a penis," that "being white no matter how talented gives you an advantage." When a woman in the audience bravely objected to these assertions, saying that she had white male friends who had been turned down for jobs in favor of women, she was jeered and ridiculed by the session leaders, who said she "had been trained well" by the white male system. I left this session feeling drained. Although I felt abused, I did not know how to describe the experience to myself or to others until a while later when I saw the resolution of a hostage crisis situation on television. As I watched the faces of the relieved hostages emerging from the small office building where they had been held against their will by a ranting madman, I felt an immediate kinship. I know exactly how you feel, I thought to myself. CRAIG T. COBANE II is a doctoral student in political science at the University of Cincinnati. A different version of this article appeared in Campus.

6 PAGE 6 MARCH 1994 SOMETHING FISHY: Stanley Walks the Cutting Edge Adark Prince of the English department at Duke University has brought his limpid literary powers to bear in the defense of multiculturalism, affirmative action, feminism, gay rights and ethnic studies; but the great Army of Indignation to which Stanley Fish now offers his allegiance has already triumphed wherever it has taken the field. Leaping superbly to the canon's mouth, Fish runs the unaccustomed risk of seeming to leap too late. It is no surprise, then, that the elegant essays that result are informed, they are often sanctified, by an appeal to large but somewhat anachronistic philosophical principles. In his acquired sympathies, Stanley Fish is of the camp given over to what he calls "the interpretive turn," a maneuver undertaken by theorists committed to the thesis that far from being langauge subordinate to a world of facts, it is language that brings facts into being. Those troubled by the turn, Fish acknowledges, take it to imply that "words have no intrinsic meaning, values are relative, rationality is a social construct, everything is political, every reading is a misreading" and argue by contraposition that the interpretive turn is a mistake, indeed, a ghastly blunder. Fish accepts the inference but revels in its conclusions, regarding them as commonplaces. "There is no such thing as literal meaning," he buoyantly affirms (italics, mine), "a meaning that because it is prior to interpretation can serve as a constraint on interpretation." But what Fish writes in the course of denying the existence of literal meaning is meaningful in English and not in Farsi, a circumstance that might suggest constraints on interpretation of precisely the sort that Fish thinks nonexistent; by now the point is well known, if not well taken, and from time to time Fish himself (or a sinister impostor) appears in the English literary journals, arguing brightly that on this matter what he said he did not mean and what he meant he did not say. Skepticism over the philosophical Fish thus starts early; it never flags. If literal meanings go in one essay, "transcendent" truths disappear in another. Whatever they are, those truths, "[they] would not speak to any particular condition, or be identified with any historical production, or be formulated in terms of any ethnic, racial, economic or class traditions," and lacking these identifying caste marks they would be humanly (but not divinely) inaccessible. Yet if there are no transcendent truths, there are nonetheless transcendent statements those that fail to mention history, class, race and gender and of these there are many: Fish's book is full of them, and it is only the fact that they are false that robs these transcendent statements of their role as transcendent truths; but if they are false, their negations are true and thus one and the same argument successfully affirms what it was intended to deny. If Fish is wrong about the transcendent truths, he is wrong again about truths that are not transcendent. "The truths any of us find compelling," he writes, "will all be by DAVID BERLINSKI partial, which is to say they will all be political." This is a thesis yet advocated ardently by the low-browed faithful at Mongahela Community College; elsewhere Fish's line is apt to elicit only a few inordinately polite murmurs of assent. And for obvious reasons. I, for one, am completely compelled by the truth that tin is softer than molybdenum, and while this is only a part of the truth about tin, it is not necessarily a partial truth, the very form of words suggesting incoherently that a particular truth might, like a Chevrolet Camaro, be broken down into parts, and not even partially a political truth if the political and metallurgical truths are in any reasonable sense distinct. Fish's animadversions on transcendence thus constitute a clean sweep, with every argument invalid, every premise false. Essentialism represents another tempting but dangerous target. "The essential," Fish affirms in his preface, "is a rhetorical category whose shape varies with the contingencies of history and circumstance." Confidence in this familiar declaration, another Mongahela lunchroom staple, does not survive a confrontation with examples, as when one says that the noble and lovely thing answering to the name of Stanley might have been a lawyer rather than a literary critic, but not that he might have been a seal rather than a man, some essential part of what it is to be Stanley having been irretrievably and thus poignantly lost were he to emerge dripping from the waves, sleek fur receding over a phocine head. This judgment appears to owe little either to the contingencies of history or circumstance. Might Fish have been a seal in another time or place? Under other circumstances? It is again a contingent fact that cats do not have pink fur and lack the capacity to crochet sweaters or play the oboe, but not a contingent fact that cats are mammals rather than reptiles or amphibians; it is a part of the essence of literary criticism that it is not dentistry. Whatever a critic's position on essentialism, and the issue is yet vexed and has long been vexed, the distinctions embodied by these commonly made and intuitively plausible judgments need either to be enforced or, if rejected, explained convincingly as artifacts. This Fish does not do. Atheistic on essences, Fish is radical on epistemology, arguing in the course of the otherwise sensible "Being Interdisciplinary is So Very Hard to Do" that "knowledge...cannot grasp, or name the grounds of, its possibility, and whenever it thinks to have done so, those grounds are elsewhere than they seem to be...," an affirmation calling to mind nothing so much as a fraternity brother's astonished discovery that try as he might he can never catch sight of his own well upholstered rear end, it swiveling as he swivels and all. If the objects of knowledge are propositions, the grounds of any proposition constitute, on one reading of Fish's assertion, the set of propositions necessary, but not necessarily sufficient, for its truth. The thesis of radical epistemology, then, is that one could never know on pain of infinite regress the set of sentences necessary for every sentence that one knows. This thesis is true so long as no sentence is necessary for itself, which is to say not obviously true at all; and indeed, if the truths are taken to be points in the closed unit ball in Euclidean n- space (and grounds expressed by continuous functions), demonstrably false by Brower's fixed point theorem, the argument too obvious to bear repeating. Epistemology is not a strong subject for Fish; but then again neither is ontology or metaphysics. Writing in the book's introduction about the difference between the sociology of science and science itself, he proposes to let incompatible doctrines, like sleeping dogs live where they lie: "Acting scientifically means acting on the assumption of a determinate nature waiting to be described by a neutral observation language; acting sociologically means acting on the assumption that nature is socially constructed by the very speech acts of which it is supposedly the cause." Expatiating on this theme, Fish remarks that it "is no longer taken for granted," and surely not taken for granted by him, that "molecules and quarks come first" in the scheme of things, "and scientists' models of molecules and quarks come second." These theses taken literally, it follows that as far as sociologists of science are concerned, a speech act could bring an elephant into existence (Arise, Dumbo); and that molecules (and so the materials they compose) did not exist before the molecular theory of matter the Cathedral at Chartres thus acquiring, in Fish's account, its molecular structure eight hundred years after its construction. This is not an intellectual position calculated to inspire confidence. It is Fish's plangent conviction that an older, insufficiently flexible generation of scholars has rejected the interpretative turn because it is unfamiliar; he is sympathetic to their plight: "One cannot blame those who entered the academy thirty years ago for feeling discombobulated and dispossessed by developments they could not possibly have predicted..." The cover photograph on his book persuades me that if Fish is not middleaged he is at least a man of certain years, and if he has managed to retain the intellectual suppleness necessary for a fine appreciation of the interpretive turn it cannot be age alone that keeps the rest of us scoffing on the sidelines.

7 HETERODOXY PAGE 7 I n the title essay of his collection, "There is No Such Thing as Free Speech... and It's a Good Thing, Too," the socially engaged Fish forsakes philosophy in order to argue suavely that it might in some circumstances be a good idea to shut some people up. Who would argue? But those whom Fish wishes to silence I am prepared hoarsely to urge on from the sidelines; those that he encourages I would see silenced as so many public nuisances. Controversy over cases inevitably remains, prompting the corro-sive suspicion that if there is no agreement on who is to be silenced, it might be the better part of wisdom to leave off silencing anyone. The traditional defense of freedom of speech, Fish believes, rests on a flabby and insupportable distinction between speech and action. A distinction denied is a distinction discarded and if speech is a species of action it falls, it must fall, under the scope of rules or regulations, speech crime arising at the busy intersection of a public prohibition and a provocative utterance. It is, of course, trivially true that what a man says is a part of what he does. Contracts are created, hearts are broken, and marriages are made on the strength of what is said, and Fish's efforts to suggest that he is alone in perceiving this elementary fact engender a false air of Fish v. Foul, et. al. Investing speech with the attributes of action is yet compatible with the observation that, like snow upon the desert's dusty face, much that a man says falls quite without effect. Still, if some things are said without effect, others plainly are not; the law recognizes libel, slander and blackmail, and common sense recognizes as well what Fish earnestly affirms, namely that "speech-related injuries may be grievous and deeply wounding," even if as offense taken multiplies on every university campus the objective evidence for offense given tends to dwindle and then disappear. Cases remains in which offense is both given and taken. No set of specific rules, Fish admits, can inform the deliberations of campus censors addressing racist, sexist and homophobic speech, but Fish is well disposed in general to a principle of expected utility expressed succinctly by Judge Learned Hand: "[A]sk whether the gravity of the 'evil' discounted by its improbability justifies such invasion of free speech as is necessary to avoid the danger" (U.S. v. Dennis, 183/. 2d 212). As a principle I see no way to fault this. Who would argue for the imposition of a likely evil, especially one grave? But Justice Hand is appealing to a dangerous evil and Fish to speech-related injuries, and however galling it may be for people of color to be called colored people, the imposition of the epithet hardly jeopardizes the distinction between two quite different categories of sin. The principle of expected utility is in any event too strong to do Fish much good, going as it does beyond what is false inadvertently to proscribe and then purge what is true. There are, after all, plenty of statements that it would be better for humanity never to have uttered or having uttered never to have heard. E=MC 2 comes readily to mind; that, and in view of the cholesterol count of the dish that results, the recipe for fettucine Alfredo. I leave the development of this argument as an exercise; the real troubles for Fish lie elsewhere. The concept of a speech crime suggests something like a rule of three specificities: no speech crime without a specific baleful effect, of course, but also no speech crime not tied to a specific circumstance of utterance and a specific form of words. Absent the effects and there is nothing to talk of; absent the specific form of words and there is no speech crime, the misdeed mournfully indistinct, passing from something hard-edged and glittering to a crime marked as a crime only by the circumstance that an offense has been conveyed by words. What is streng verboten, campus speech codes must affirm, is saying there follow the forbidden words, sentences, tracts or theories, the specific sentence, for example, that women are low sloppy beasts. But absent the specific circumstance of utterance and there is no speech crime, the charge lapsing, for example, if I merely mention but do not use specific forbidden words, as Fish himself does on p. 111, or if I deny publicly that women are low sloppy beasts, or if I doubt that they are, or if I speculate that they are, or if I accept for the purposes of argument that they are only assertion, avowal or declaration carrying the requisite intentional commitment necessary to bring about a crime. But as the circumstances of utterance are fixed, specificity in the form of words unavoidably disappears. Attitudes such as assertion, avowal or declaration take propositional objects, something indicated by their gram-. mar as forms of indirect discourse, and propositions are constitutionally dissociated from any specific choice of words used to express them. I may thus affirm that women are low sloppy beasts without ever once using those very words, as when I express the thought in French or in Swahili, or when overhearing Fish of all people! indecorously affirm that women are low sloppy beasts, I agree publicly with him, or murmur "Attaboy Stanley," or say simply "Way to go Chucklenuts," this imaginary case altogether too close for comfort to cases that have already passed into the personal scrapbook of proud campus censors. Conveying the thought that women are low sloppy beasts by using the words "Way to go Chucklenuts," I may well induce "speechrelated injuries" that are both "grievous and deeply wounding," my offense the more vexing in virtue of its obliqueness. The requirement that words be used assertively means that uttering a specific form of words on a particular occasion is never sufficient for the charge of speech crime. The argument just given implies that uttering a specific form of words on a particular occasion is never necessary for speech crime either. And if uttering a specific form of words is neither necessary nor sufficient for speech crime, it is hard to see that any independent content remains to the concept, speech crime appearing inevitably as an aspect of thought crime, a fact long known to censors and tyrants alike. I t is in "Reverse Racism," that Fish comes to the defense of affirmative action, a cause that evokes his assent in proportion, one might suspect, to the extent that it has never seriously jeopardized his career. To the objection that affirmative action is reprehensible because racist, and racist because based on color, Fish responds that a racist policy and a "policy designed to remedy that plight" are not, after all, the same thing, an assertion trivially true, skeptics will observe, in view of the fact that they have just been described as having different aims. But differing in their aims, apartheid and affirmative action may nonetheless be alike in appealing to reprehen sible means. To point out the mistake is to see a variant promptly embodied. "Reverse racism," Fish writes, "is a cogent description of affirmative action only if one consid ers the virus of racism to be morally and medically indis tinguishable from the remedy we apply to it." But racism and its remedies may well differ in any number of respects, the good intentions of those urging the remedies on racists the most obvious; it yet remains true that reverse racism is a cogent, an inescapable, description of affirmative action, Fish's assertion falling to an invocation of modus tollendo tollens. ; A larger issue entirely infects Fish's argument. Is affirmative action to be simply a remedy for past injustice, nothing more? Fish is uncertain, his prose becoming inky at a crucial point: "[I]t is a travesty of reasoning," he writes, "to argue that affirmative action, which gives preferential treatment to disadvantaged minorities as part of a plan to achieve social equality, is no different from the policies that created the disadvantages in the first place." The pairing of preferential treatment and disadvantaged minorities resurrects a remedial conception of affirmative action, one that issues in a familiar and explicit recommendation: that those who have been injured by an evil social policy should be compensated by the society that has injured them. The objection to affirmative action thus described is well known: extending rewards on the basis of race, affirmative action benefits some who have not been directly injured by an evil social policy and punishes others who have not directly benefited from an evil social policy. It is unfair, and as time goes on it becomes progressively more unfair, tending in the university environment to acquire the frank aspect of a racket. Affirmative action thus collides with the ancestral moral doctrine that two wrongs do not make a right, a collision that evokes no sympathy whatsoever from Fish, who champions the contrary doctrine of compensatory injustice. "[T]he word unfair" Fish writes, "is hardly an adequate description of [the black] experience." If unfairness is inadequate as an adjective, then fairness, Fish reasons, "as a resolution no longer to discriminate against [blacks] legally is hardly an adequate remedy." But the fact that fairness is insufficient as a remedy hardly implies that it is not necessary, Fish's conclusion to the contrary constituting a textbook example of a non sequitur. And this, the charge of unfairness, is of course the gravamen of the case against affirmative action. It would no doubt provide a salutary shock for those infected or afflicted by the residue of racism were a few white men flogged and then lynched each year. Strong illness, strong remedy,as Fish might say, as Fish in fact does say in defending affirmative action; but if Fish would scruple at such injustice, it is hard to see that he would have any better defense than the one he derides in the case of affirmative action, namely than two wrongs don't make a right. There are principles that, indeed, one gives up at one's peril. The inclusion of affirmative action in "a plan to achieve social equality" points Fish toward the badlands that lie beyond any remedial scheme, social equality functioning in his text as a coded description of a society in which rewards are distributed by means of a spoils system, one based on skin color and gender. But if 15 percent of the mathematical physicists at the Institute for Advanced Study must be black and 50 percent women, skill in solving differential equations will not by itself remain a standard of merit and so a criterion for advancement in that institution. To his credit, Fish is sensitive to this point. Raising the possibility early on that "merit... itself [may be] a contested category," Fish himself contests it cheerfully later on, arguing that inasmuch as "diversity will be an important factor in the educational experience," race must count for something. What holds for blacks, holds again for women; but unlike blacks, who need to achieve minimum scores to pass muster in race norming at Berkeley, merely the "very presence" of women in a department, of say, microbiology, Fish believes, "makes a difference," and although he does not say what kind of difference it is apt to be, he is in favor of the result. The thesis that Fish embraces with some residual diffidence, others endorse with a hearty, vulgar sense they have seen the high ground and propose to command it. "The world is changing, higher education is changing, our definitions of quality are changing," the ignorant and abysmal Ralph Wolff, director of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges accrediting commission, boisterously affirmed in a recent edition of The San Francisco Chronicle (February 24, 1994); contrary to Fish's view that professors of English carry little influence in the world at large, doctrines that arise in departmental colloquia often survive to become principles of practical dogma. But the policy that Fish commends carries consequences that he might otherwise deplore. Blacks entering the freshman class at the University of California as the beneficiaries of affirmative action leave some years later as its victims, the standard of merit by which they gained admission suspended at some point between their introduction to the Afro-American Experience and their introduction to the Calculus, diversity appearing to everyone but affirmative action officials as little more than a cruel and pointless jest. This bitter truth is widely known; it is not widely acknowledged. The divided Fish is a discordant Fish. Not only are the conceptions of affirmative action that he contemplates different, they are incompatible, diversity working against remedial relief and remedial relief inconsistent with diver sity. If diversity is an end in itself there is no reason to exclude from consideration mesomorphs, those who lisp, Hakkas, the congenitally retarded, men who are lefthanded, women under five feet in height, the morbidly obese, hemorrhoid sufferers, Swiss Chinese lesbians there are more minorities than members in any society and so as the demand for diversity grows, places available to satisfy that demand must dwindle; but if every minority is entitled to some representational share of the spoils, diversity cannot be a remedy to the black community for the particular injustices they are said to have suffered. Rights are general; remedies are not, and in the face of a declaration of diversity, members of the black community may well ask what's in it for us. On the other hand, if affirmative action entitles the black com munity to a specific, a remedial, share of the spoils, some aspect of diversity as a social program must inevitably be compromised, since one portion of the available spoils will be set aside irremovably for one minority in virtue of what they have suffered and not in virtue of who they are. This is a dilemma sensed by many representatives of the black community; when proposals are made to diversify the college campus, their response is often a very tepid grunt of painfully formal enthusiasm. In "The Common Touch or One Size Fits All,'' an essay devoted to the much contested canon of great books, Fish comes to the defense of "those for whom mattersof class, race, ethnicity and gender are of paramount

8 PAGE 8 MARCH 1994 importance and abiding concern, that is, those who are poor, black, Hispanic, Asian, female, gay, etc." Without his advocacy, Fish is persuaded, class, race, ethnicity and gender may for a moment go unmentioned, a prospect for those familiar with the shape of campus controversies that will seem richly preposterous. And as for those who are poor, black, Hispanic, Asian, female and gay, their endless geschrei fills the academic presses and campus podiums, striking evidence, if any were needed, that whatever attempts may have been made to exclude these groups from discourse have been tragically unsuccessful. The position that Fish advocates on the canon is at odds somewhat with his practice, which reveals, as he himself is the first to admit, that whatever the outcome of the debate, he at any rate is not going to get caught teaching feminist hermeneutics to walnut-eyed women or spending time reading from the works of various Third World worthies. Nonetheless, Fish is provoked beyond measure by appeals to common grounds in the humanities, by appeals to common anything. "Someone who says to you," he writes, the froth of indignation on his lips, " 'This is our common ground,' "is really saying, 'This is my common ground, the substratum of assumptions and values that produces my judgment, and it should be yours, too.' " Addressing essays by Lynn Cheney and George Steiner, and by extension Alan Bloom, Chester Finn, William Bennett and many others, Fish is persuaded that the demand for an uncorrupted canon "reflects [nothing more than] the authoritative imposition of one group's very particular tastes in the name of the common and the transcendental." But the categories of the common and the transcendental appear in this quotation algebraically to cancel one another. The burden of Fish's objurgations is carried by his adopted indignation that somewhere, someone's tastes are being imposed on others. What results is a curiously self-defeating hunchbacked argument. If the disagreement over the canon is genuine, it cannot be a matter of taste. Taste causes preferences and preferences may be different without revealing disagreement, the fact that I may prefer Milton to Maya Angelou compatible with the fact that others may prefer Maya Angelou to Milton. If the disagreement is not a matter of taste, then it must be a matter of judgment. But if judgments are in conflict, they cannot all be true on the grounds that if inconsistent truths may be upheld by different groups they are not inconsistent. Now either judgments are compelling or they are not. It would seem that everyone party to the dispute over the canon is compelled by his or her version of the truth. "No one in the field," Fish pointedly reminds us, "is aligning himself with falsities." But "when the present shape of truth is compelling beyond a reasonable doubt," Fish adds, "it is our moral obligation to act on it and not to defer action in the name of an interpretive future that may never arrive" (my own zestful italics). To act on a judgment is to urge it vigorously on others: "In ordinary contexts," Fish reminds us again, "talk is produced with the goal of trying to move the world in one direction rather than another" (the italics mine again). Moving the world is just what Lynn Cheney, George Steiner, William Bennett, Alan Bloom and Chester Finn are endeavoring to do. And if this is so, for heaven's sake, why is Fish criticizing them since the argument that sustains them is one that Fish has himself lovingly prepared? Fish's indignation, then, is at odds with his argument, so that the two invocations, that indignation and the argument that follows, describe the antipodes of a closed sphere in space. It is not, then, their advocacy that Fish would dispute, but the judgments themselves or the way in which they are reached. "What are these truths," he asks, "and how and by whom are they to be identified?" But of these questions, the first is asked rhetorically, since the theses advanced by Lynn Cheney and others are well known; and the second is unanswerable on the grounds that no one knows quite how the truth is ever reached. It is the last of these questions that expresses the dissenting Fish, by whom functioning as a way of suggesting that the truths answering to the first part of the question have been corrupted by a partisan, a political, agenda and so do not count as truths at all. This is argument by insinuation, to give it a name and assign it to a rhetorical category, and consists in the expectation that a series of slight doubts will sum to a substantial deficit. It is invalid as an argumentative form and like so many such arguments, it does not survive a confrontation with a counter-example. Proponents of a core curriculum in arithmetic, to take the obvious case, often stress that the natural numbers follow a certain order and must be arranged in a certain way, so that 10 is indisputably a greater number than six. Greater for whom, one might ask, following Fish? The appropriate answer must surely be that it does not matter. The argument by multiculturalists in favor of a system according to which the number two is followed by many or the denunciation by feminist epistemologists of a phallocentric number system in which some numbers are greater than others and so function as swollen symbols of patriarchy these we dismiss as an idiotic irrelevance, whatever the pitch of controversy; correspondingly, the affirmation that 10 is greater than six retains its truth even if made by those who occupy the hot white center of overwhelming political power. What remains, then, of Fish's argumentative meditation on the great books is his projected sense that there is conflict about the canon, a point trivially true inasmuch as Fish's essay itself contributes to that conflict; but the fact that certain familiar claims about the western tradition have been contested hardly means that they are false. For the most part, these essays make for good company. I say for the most part because there is one essay in this collection that Stanley Fish will, I am persuaded, remember with a moan of embarrassed dismay. I refer to his attack on Arthur Schlesinger in "Bad Company." In The Disuniting of America, Schlesinger argued for a number of propositions, all of them on the rosy border of common sense: that the achievement of the United States as a multi-ethnic Empire is contingent upon a shared sense of national identity; that the United States in its institutions, its culture, its language, its way of life, its presumed moral universe, is an expression of European culture and that its chief legal and government institutions are Anglo Saxon in their cast and character; that the United States is in its largest aspect a part of western civilization and not the alien civilizations of Africa or the east. Against this, Fish would argue that Schlesinger's book is in a tradition of turn-of-the-century anti-immigration works such as The Melting Pot Mistake (Henry Pratt Fairchild) or Our Country (Josiah Strong). In the tradition? Not at all. Fish is "arguing for a match at every level, from the smallest detail to the deepest assumptions." Really? In what particulars? Fish mentions only three. The works Fish deplores he deplores because in the first instance they are "anti-immigration tracts"; in the second, "anti- Catholic" in their sentiments; and in the third, expressive of "out and out racism." Anti-immigration? What Schlesinger says is this: "American has so long seen itself as the asylum for the oppressed and the persecuted and has done itself and the world so much good thereby that any curtailment in immigration offends something in the Americans soul." Anti-catholic? There is no mention of the word 'catholic' in the index of Schlesinger's book; the word does not occur essentially in the text. So much for that "match at every level, from the smallest detail to the deepest assumptions." Racist? What Schlesinger says is: "White settlers had systematically pushed the American Indians back, killed their braves, seized their lands, and sequestered their tribes. They had brought Africans to America to work their plantations and Chinese to build their railroads. They had enunciated glittering generalities of freedom and withheld them from people of color. Their Constitution protected slavery, and their laws made distinctions on the basis of race....it occurred to damned few white Americans in these years that Americans of color were entitled to the rights and liberties promised by the Constitution." In a passage already notorious, Fish asks whether Arthur Schlesinger is a racist. "If you mean by racism," he responds, answering his own question, "the deployment of a vocabulary that avoids racist talk but has the effects of perpetuating racist stereotypes and the institutions that promote them then...mr. Schlesinger, with his talk of the inevitable Anglo Saxon 'coloring' of the American character and the necessity of sublimating ethnic strains in a true American amalgam, is a shoo-in." If what Schlesinger has written makes him a racist, all that I can say is, count me in. I would not leave the reader with the impression that the reprehensible Fish is a representative Fish. The Fish. that I myself have come to treasure is a Fish whose fine sense of the margins of the preposterous, whether in argument or affirmation, is undercut at every occasion by a very human need to determine whether those margins may be crossed without anyone anywhere noticing that anything is amiss. It is thus that Fish recounts his own experiences with affirmation action. Passed over for some high level administrative position, he attributes his bad luck to a preference for minorities or women on the part of the institution that might have hired him. "Although I was disappointed," he writes manfully, "I did not conclude that the situation was 'unfair.' " How delicious! Here is a full professor of English and law at Duke University, a man with not a financial or professional care in the world, his reputation excepted, blithely assuming that he has something in common with the poor schnooks (like me) who have been cashiered from temporary jobs in order to make room for women or blacks. Ah, Stanley. Ah, humanity. DAVID BERLINSKI is a writer in the Bay Area and the author of The Academic Asherfeld.

9 HETERODOXY PAGE 9 After the question "Who killed Vince Foster?" the hottest topic among Washington's chattering classes these days is the "coming out" of David Brock, the conservative investigative journalist whose bestselling book, The Real Anita Hill, exposed a liberal icon as a fraud and whose recent reporting has shed new light on Bill Clinton's sexual peccadillos and the private lives of both Clintons. More than a month after Brock openly proclaimed his homosexuality on the pages of the Washington Post's Style section, the story is still generating copy. There are, of course, several interesting angles to the story. Was Brock "outed," as he claims, by the New York Times's Frank Rich with the connivance of The New Yorker's Sidney Blumenthal? Why has the self-proclaimed "sensitive" mainstream press, which usually portrays homosexuality as an oppressed virtue, used Brock's sexual preference/orientation as a means of tarring his reputation? And what do conservatives, generally thought to be "homophobic" or anti-gay, think about one of their most celebrated and respected members coming out? For many on the right, Rich's column of sexual innuendo about Brock and the consequences that followed it were simply attempts by the liberal press to bring down America's hottest conservative voice this side of Rush Limbaugh and the only investigative journalist of note on the right. Furthermore, as a young man, Brock seemed to have his best years ahead of him and seemed also to have enough of the right stuff when it came to journalistic digging to someday become a conservative Bob Woodward. The improbability of David Brock seems even more striking when one realizes that he graduated from that mecca of radicalism, the University of California at Berkeley, where he was editor of the daily student newspaper. In 1986, Brock left Berkeley for Washington, D.C., to take a job as a reporter for Insight magazine, a small-circulation conservative weekly affiliated with The Washington Times. Then came a stint as a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, where he spent a couple of years writing freelance articles for The American Spectator and began work on a book about Congress, Then, as Brock puts it, the Anita Hill story fell into his lap. What he thought was a routine assignment instead blossomed into a blockbuster. His article "The Real Anita Hill" painted a very different portrait of Clarence Thomas' former assistant from the one that had appeared in the mainstream press. It was a profile of a woman who was both weak and calculating, a woman who had her own agenda and allowed herself to advance the agenda of others. (The article revealed for the first time that the original leaks about charges of sexual harassment originated with the staff members working under Democratic Senators on the Judiciary Committee.) That issue of the Spectator soon sold out, and when Rush Limbaugh began to read sections of the article on his radio show the magazine began selling reprints by the stack. Brock was literally the only investigative reporter to cast a suspicious eye on Hill and the only one to dig at the information buried behind and beneath her relationship with Thomas. Rather than earning him respect, his article made him plenty of enemies among the country's journalistic elite. But then, the Spectator could be written off as, in Katie Couric's words, "a far-right-wing radical journal," so he wasn't seen as too much of a threat The networks and the mainstream press pretty much ignored THE REAL DAVID BROCK by JEFF MUIR his revelations both about Hill herself and about the process of confirming a Supreme Court nominee. But then Brock went a step farther and turned the article into a book by the same title. The reporting was solid; the case Brock made about the venality and fecklessness of Anita Hill catapulted his book onto the New York Times bestseller list, where it spent several weeks. {The Real Anita Hill has sold over 170,000 copies to date and will soon be in paperback.) David Brock could no longer be ignored. The establishment media did its best at first to freeze DAVID BROCK him out and later discredit him. The Today Show took the unusual step of allowing Anita Hill's lawyer to appear alongside Brock when they interviewed him. The New Yorker seriously tested the bounds of journalistic ethics by having two women, who were themselves writing a pro- Hill book about the Thomas affair, review Brock's book. When none of this did any good, the "liberal press" showed that it was not a creation of conservative paranoia by going a big step further. A fter his book's great success, Brock was hired full time as an investigative reporter by the Spectator. Much like the Hill story, the Trooper story too seemingly fell into his lap. "I went to Arkansas to look into the Vince Foster story," says Brock. "Something about his death didn't seem right to me. When I got there, I came into contact with the Troopers, and it just went from there." Having begun looking for answers to a suspicious Washington suicide, Brock instead found evidence to confirm some of the rumors about Bill Clinton's alleged infidelity, one of the sleeping stories (so to speak) of the 1992 campaign. Brock says the Troopers originally approached him with the idea that he would collaborate on a book with them on their first-hand experience with Clinton's extramarital escapades. He decided that the troopers didn't have enough information to merit an entire book, but he convinced them to go on the record for his Spectator story. The magazine released copies of the story to the press several days before it hit the newsstands. CNN picked it up and sent its own team down to Little Rock to interview the Troopers. The rest of the networks followed suit. Then the Associated Press sent a piece on Brock's story out over their newswires, and the Washington Post did a front-page story on it. All of sudden David Brock was everywhere, from Nightline to C-SPAN. Having followed up and exceeded the success of his Anita Hill reporting, Brock had established himself as the hottest conservative in the country. But despite the sensational nature of what has come to be known as "Troopergate" ("Fornigate,") Brock was still treated with a measure of disdain or disrespect by his fellow journalists. His appearance on Nightline was perhaps typical. Brock was paired with Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior editor of The New Republic who is now Washington editor of The New Yorker (whose anti-brock bias had been proved by the unorthodox book review of The Real Anita Hill earlier in the year). In an amazing display of hubris and doubletalk, Blumenthal said of Brock, "[he's] a young right-wing writer I hesitate to call him a journalist." Blumenthal, repeating what had become the standard response to Brock's revelations about Clinton, stated that since Brock worked for a publication with political motives, his reporting was therefore to be taken with a grain of salt. "There are political motives and political forces behind this that ought to be considered," said Blumenthal of the Trooper story. Clearly there is a double standard being applied here, which is characteristic of left journalism. Forget for a moment his own blatantly partisan reporting for both The New Yorker and The New Republic. Blumenthal himself has been caught allowing "political motives" to interfere with his credibility. Last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that while he was covering the 1994 presidential campaign, Blumenthal wrote at least one speech for Democratic candidate Gary Hart. Brock doesn't let attacks by people like Blumenthal get to him. "As long as I feel comfortable with the facts that I report, I don't let the criticism and personal attacks bother me," he says. "I'm a reporter, an investigative journalist, and the standard by which I measure myself and by which others ought to measure me is whether or not I get the facts right." B rock first heard rumors about his sexual orientation just after the release of the Anita Hill book. In fact, he had never done much to hide his life-style or stay "in the closet" in the first place. He simply refused unlike other gay writers to mingle his personal life with his professional, and so it remained his personal life. In any case, the rumors subsided. But then came his coup with the Trooper story and the Frank Rich column in the New York Times, which led to his eventual declaration that he was gay in a story in the Washington Post. "Before I went with the Trooper story," says Brock, "I thought about the sex angle and the Anita Hill stuff, and I figured that someone, somewhere would begin to talk about my sexual orientation." Did he consider not running the story to protect his privacy? "Only for the briefest of moments," according to Brock. "After all, aside from hurting me personally, what my enemies really want is for me to shut up. And I wasn't going to assist them in that effort." Expecting the issue to come up in the days after the

10 PAGE 10 MARCH 1994 Trooper story, Brock recognized the Rich column which did not directly accuse him of being gay but approached the issue obliquely by attacking him as antiwoman as a "thinly veiled outing." Rich continues to insist that his column was about Brock's misogyny, and not his sexuality, claiming that "it is indeed a homophobic cliche to equate misogyny with homosexuality." But of course it was exactly that cliche" that Rich was playing on. In the column Rich used all the code words and phrases that a generation ago implied homosexuality. For example: "The slightest sighting of female sexuality whips [Brock] into a frenzy of misogynist zeal" and "All women are the same to Mr. Brock: terrifying guttertongued sexual omnivores." Perhaps the most transparent passage in the article had Rich speculating as to Brock's preferred man: "[His] idea of a non-bizarre man is one of the troopers, Larry Paterson, whom he idolizes as a macho image of abstinence: 'tall and trim, with the upright demeanor and closely cropped hair of a military officer.'" The revelation that Brock is a homosexual has indeed sent shock waves through just about every segment of the political journalism community. Most liberal pundits and columnists have blasted Brock for complaining about having his sexual orientation revealed while he has made his career and reputation reporting on the sex lives of other public figures. Conservatives have countered that the original critique of Brock was that he reported on irrelevant aspects of his subjects lives their sexuality and now that his sexuality can be used against him, these same liberals are more than happy to use it to discredit Brock. Certain fringe elements of the conservative movement have been critical of Brock for being gay. Paul Cameroon, head of the Family Research Institute, recently criticized Brock, saying, "Shame on him for coming out of the closet." For the most part, however, conservatives have said, "So what?" And that attitude, according to Brock, is one of the reasons he's always been attracted to the conservative movement and conservative principles. "I've always felt more comfortable with conservatives," he says, "because they generally have an attitude that judges a person based on his individual abilities and accomplishments. For the most part, conservatives can be against the radical homosexual agenda as a general principle yet still respect, admire and work with gay individuals." Brock says he's been deluged by requests to discuss his sexuality from the gay and mainstream press. He has refused every one of them except the original Washington Post story. Why? "They all wanted me to discuss 'gay issues'," says Brock, "and I just don't want to be marginalized as a 'gay writer' or a 'gay conservative.' I do have opinions on, say, gays in the military or gay marriage. I will not discuss them publicly, because they have no bearing on what I do: investigative reporting." Despite having his personal life dragged through the media, David Brock is on top of the world. Coverage of his Troopergate scoop has made him the most sought after conservative commentator around. He has an audience awaiting his next investigative project with anticipation (and enemies who await it with fear and trembling). And while he handles himself superbly on television, Brock insists that he has no interest in the world of punditry. "I just want to be a journalist," he maintains. "I'd love to spend the rest of my life as an investigative reporter, writing books every few years." Is there a book on the Clintons in his future? "There's certainly a couple of books' worth of material there," says Brock, "but I don't know if I'm going to write one." One thing is for certain: his enemies have failed if they thought that they could intimidate Brock. He has no plans to leave the Spectator, and he has no plans to shy away from controversial stories. JEFF MUIR works for the Madison Center for Educational Research in Washington, D.C. WHY JOANIE CAN'T ADD continued from page 1 Anne Bryant, to crow in fractured syntax (coincidentally proving that, for some women, English class was no breeze either): "It's a wake-up call to manufacturers that there's greater sensitivity for toys not to continue stereotypes." Women probably do not have an inbred inability to do math, but radical feminists certainly suffer from a fatal attraction to flawed statistics and sloppy thought that gives the whole of the second sex a bad name with regards to questions of numeracy. In fact, hatred for mathematics and its nearrelative, logic is virtually the only thing that the various movements that make tip the left wing in America have in common anymore. My favorite example comes from a lesbian feminist named Victoria Brownworth. She recently wrote a column in the Philadelphia Gay News in which she repeated a historical example that is apparently making the rounds among phallophobes these days. This example is intended to prove that male heterosexuals can be just as promiscuous as homosexuals. "There were on the streets of London on the day Victoria was crowned queen, three prostitutes for every man in England," Brownworth wrote. Whew! Let's subject that sentence to a little remedial math. First, we'll assume that England had in those days roughly the same number of men as women. It becomes obvious that even if every female in the nation, from babies to octogenarians, had been dressed up like Madonna and planted on street corners, the hooker-tojohn ratio could not have exceeded 1 to 1. Virtually the entire female populations of France and Holland would have had to be imported to reach a 3 to 1 ratio of prostitutes to male English citizens. But odds are that only about a quarter of the males in England would have been in London that day, so the hookers would have outnumbered their potential clients by about 12 to 1. Is it any wonder that, after wading through this crowd, Victoria would go on to usher in an era of prudery? The appalling thing about such idiocies is not that someone has uttered them, but that they can be gazed upon by editors and read by the public and never questioned. A classic example occurred when the great thinkers of the American feminist movement rose as one to declare Naomi Wolf's book, The Beauty Myth, a masterpiece. Wolf's central assertion is that American women are starving themselves into anorexia in an attempt to attain an ideal of beauty forced on them by the white male establishment. Great theme, but unfortunately no such trend exists. Nutrition experts regularly survey the American population to determine rates of anorexia and bulimia. The best such surveys show the numbers holding steady at below 2 percent of American women. But the facts aren't even speed bumps to Wolf's rush to judgment. She spews number after number until she convinces herself that the majority of American females are dangerously thin. (Hasn't this woman ever been to a K-mart?) Four out of five female college students suffers from either anorexia or bulimia, she tells us contrary to all evidence. Of her absurd statistics, here's my favorite: "The United Kingdom now has 3.5 million anorexics or bulimics (95 percent of them female), with 6,000 new cases yearly." Nice try, Naomi. But if Britain is accumulating anorexics and bulimics at the paltry rate of 6,000 yearly, it would take 583 years to reach a total of 3.5 million. The only way the country could have reached that total is by adding up virtually every anorexic who had trod English soil since the signing of the Magna Carta. Anorexia must lead, not to an early death, but to immortality. The idea that any warm, fuzzy sentiment is entitled to uncritical acceptance certainly is not unique to the women of the left. Mush-minded males are equally guilty. A recent Harris Poll made the claim that one in 10 American youths between the ages of 10 and 19 had fired a gun at someone. The poll was funded by a gun-control group that has the rather Orwellian goal of "transforming gun violence from a criminal issue to a public health emergency." ("Doc, I'm feeling depressed. Can I get a prescription for an AK-47?") Louis Harris himself was quoted as saying the poll was scientific. He didn't say what sort of science, however. Alchemy? Astrology? The most recent census reports that there are about 35 million, youths in the age group. Ten percent of 35 million is 3.5 million. But the FBI reports that only about 3,000 homicides are committed yearly by youths 10 through 19 years of age; In other words/ about 3,497,000;, kids must have shot and missed. This indicates that Mr. Harris's pollster^ forgot to ask an important follow-up

11 HETERODOXY PAGEll question to all those 10-year-olds who claimed to have shot at someone: "No, I mean with a real gun?" Harris claimed the poll had a 3-percent margin of error. The actual margin of error was approximately 116,500 percent. Details, mere details. Remember how the newspapers used to jump all over every inaccuracy in the public utterances of Ronald Reagan? The same editors touted this poll as if Mr. Harris had brought down his figures from Mt. Sinai. Virtually any assertion that supports liberal goals seems to go unexamined in the press. A good example from the gay liberation debate is the argument, unquestioned in the media, that gays are no more likely than heterosexuals to be child molesters. The logic goes like this: Most child molesters are heterosexuals. Therefore, heterosexuals are more likely to molest children than homosexuals, homophobic propaganda notwithstanding. Amazingly, this fallacy has won general acceptance. A Colorado judge even cited it in throwing out the results of a statewide referendum that would have banned the granting of civil rights based on sexual orientation. It is, however, total nonsense. Most child molesters are heterosexual for an obvious reason: Most people are heterosexual. The only way to answer the question of whether gays are more prone to pederasty is to determine if they commit the crime out of proportion to their numbers. To answer that question, you first have to determine what percentage of the population is homosexual. According to data assembled by a study of Psychological Reports, this figure is probably about 2 percent and certainly not more than 4 percent. Next, you have to ask what percentage of child molestations are homosexual in nature. If that number exceeds 4 percent, gays would seem to be more prone to pederasty. Studies of arrests in various jurisdictions show that, on average, 40 percent of those charged with child molestation are homosexual. At that rate, homosexuals are about 16 times more likely to be prosecuted for pederasty than heterosexuals. This conclusion is obvious from the data, but anyone voicing it would immediately be labeled a "homophobe" (an absurd term that, reduced to its Greek roots, means literally "afraid of sameness" or, if one prefers an English/ Greek etymology, "afraid of homos"). However, facts are neutral. They have no ideological content. Fundamentalist Christians might argue that a homosexual tendency to pederasty would prove that all gays should be thrown in jail. Conversely, the North American Man-Boy Love Association might, and in fact does, argue that pederasty is an essential part of gay life and should have full legal protection. In either case, the facts don't change (though the fact that NAMBLA is a member in good standing of the International Lesbian and Gay Alliance certainly adds a little something to the debate). The forces of political correctness have created an atmosphere in America in which certain facts simply cannot be mentioned. Perhaps a thorough study of the subject would prove that the average, well-adjusted gay person is indeed no more likely to commit pederasty than the average, well-adjusted hetero. We'll never know; the subject simply can't be examined. It's no wonder the left's current target is Western I culture itself. Beginning with Plato, Western culture A has been organized around the idea that the world can be understood through reason. The one outstanding leftist intellectual in the Western tradition was, of course, Karl Marx. He claimed that socialism was an exact science, and it was taught that way right up until the fall of the Soviet Union. Science having failed them, leftists have turned to emotionalism and mysticism. America's campus radicals of the '60s were nothing if not perceptive, and one thing they perceived was that the hard sciences were, indeed, hard. Advanced math required real work, but anyone who could read slow and talk fast could get a degree in English or sociology. Vietnam was a distant threat; calculus was far more menacing. The most bitter fights on American campuses were the fights to make the curriculum "relevant," i.e. easier. An interest in mathematics, never all that popular to begin with, became unacceptable behavior among the hip people on campus. That feeling has persisted to this day.. "There's something of a feeling that people who are good at math are sort of idiot savants, which is absurd," says John Allen Paulos, a Temple University math professor who coined the term innumeracy: "I know lots of mathematicians who read widely, but I know no one who's not a mathematician who reads mathematics." The antipathy among academics toward math is just a symptom of a general dumbing-down of American culture, says Paulos. "In general, I find people don't make arguments anymore. They don't say, "This is what I believe, and this is why I believe it.' They say, 'This is what I feel.'" I'm not much for conspiracy theories, but if there's a grassy knoll in all mis, one of the shadowy figures standing on it must be Ira Magaziner. Magaziner played a pivotal role in destroying higher education in America. In the '60s, Magaziner led the fight at Brown University to end requirements that students take such courses as math, science and foreign languages. This trend swept the nation. Magaziner is now asking Americans to accept on faith a 1,342-page health reform package with a math problem on every page. (Can you say "value-added tax?") And up there on the knoll next to Ira Magaziner is that three-letter organization of government employees whose power-grabbing schemes reach into virtually every area of American life. No, I'm not talking about the CIA; it is the NEA that I have in mind. The National Education Association (with its wholly-owned subsidiary, the Democratic Party) continues to resist all efforts to improve American education. Their idea of reform is still tied to the r 60s cliche of relevance. The mere mention of school choice drives them nuts, but come up with a curriculum that states the Mayans invented the toaster oven and they'll gladly parrot it. In one study of American's competitiveness in education, our ninth-graders came out 14th of 17 nations, tied with kids in Singapore and Thailand. In another, the best schools in the Minneapolis area turned out to be about equal to the worst in comparable cities in Asia. In short, we are a nation of morons, especially our teachers. One survey of high school seniors found that those who intended to major in education averaged just 845 on the combined SAT. You can score 845 on the SAT by answering correctly just 56 of a total of 145 questions, or slightly under 39 percent. Get a degree in education (another "science" that, unlike Marxism, still awaits its debunking), and you ve got a job for life "as long as you don't get caught having sex with the kids," as one teacher told me. That sounds incredible, but it's true. The NEA has been so successful in winning tenure for even the most incompetent of teachers that the basic qualification for teaching in the U.S. these days is not academic achievement but a disinterest in pederasty. All this bothers the American left not a whit They have come flush up against the reality that the best-laid plans of mice and women can't change human nature. Rationality didn't work, so they're trying irrationality. Liberal beliefs have descended to the level of the mantra; it's not whether the words make any sense, what matters is that.you mouth them often and with enthusiasm. Chant "AIDS doesn't discriminate" enough and people will ignore the statistics that show AIDS is the most discriminating contagious disease in American history. It's reached the point were anyone who introduces facts into a discussion is automatically labeled a right-winger. The good news about this turn away from the rational is that it may mark the death of the American Left. The '60s activists are now facing the doom brought about by their own success. They dumbed down American education to such a degree that an innumerate like Naomi Wolf could graduate from Yale and go on to become a leading intellectual on the left. One problem: when she became leading, she started wavering in her leftist commitments; now she's writing articles for Glamour magazine, saying how she really likes men after all, and she was recently listed in Esquire magazine as one of a new wave of "do-me" feminists. But who can blame her for her ideological meandering? No one knows what the left is anymore, In the early part of this century, leftists made the world tremble. They took over nations, raised huge armies and changed lives by the millions, often by ending them. But the leftist movement these days has taken on the air of a bitch session in a college dorm. Naomi wants to be able to stuff herself with prime rib and Twinkies and still be desirable to men. It's hard to think of a government program that could grant that wish. Militant gays, meanwhile, want to make the Army more like the Village People; again this sounds like a difficult goal. Black intellectuals want to have a racial memory of having built the pyramids; perhaps NASA can start work on a time machine. Unlike Lenin's, the modern left's agenda can't be achieved by the simple expedient of eliminating a few inconvenient souls. Barbie was right: Math class is tough, and the left is getting a failing grade, although it is the rest of us who get the report card. PAUL MULSHINE is a writer living in New Jersey.

12 PAGE 12 MARC SEX UNIVERSITY continued from page 1 This wins him a laugh. Now Angela is on the hot seat, and someone asks why she thinks the mimicry game sucks. "I don't like oneon-one," she says. Angela claimed she has had sex with five men at one time, but she doesn't practice S&M. "I like to stay in control," she says, without explaining how she kept control of the eager fivesome. "Why is this called a 'Mark Group?'" someone then wants to know. It is a legitimate question. Our host, a freckled blond named Donna, responds. "Victor Baranco compares it to carnival barkers. The people they bring in are 'marks.' Everybody is a mark for something and with us it happens to be love." V ictor Baranco, it emerges, is the founder of More University in Lafayette, California, the institution where the hosts of this "Mark Group" and several of the participants in the session received their professional training. This group in San Diego has not been trying to revive arcane '60s lifestyles, as it sometimes seemed during the meeting, but doing school work, part of More University's recruiting program. More's courses, the literature explains, include "Basic Hexing," "Aphrodisia," "Mutual Pleasurable Stimulation of the Human Nervous System" and "A Weekend with Vic." The most unique thing about More is that it grants degrees. As California's official Council for Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education verifies, since 1979 the Golden State has approved More to grant Bachelor's and Master's degrees in the humanities and communications, and Ph.D. degrees in "Lifestyles" and "Sensuality." According to recent descriptions, More University s founder, Victor Baranco, 59, stands six-foot-two and weighs some 300 pounds. He is currently living in Hawaii where he has faced drug charges. He is not approachable. "Dr. Baranco talks to people who have the proper requisites and three grand," Jackie Van Sinderen, More's Dean of Instruction, told the Contra Costa Times. She was referring to a More University course, "Audience with Victor Baranco," which costs a cool $3,000. When Times reporter Michael Hytha travelled all the way to "Dr." Baranco's hideaway in Pupukea, Hawaii, he found himself confronted by a bare-chested bodyguard named Sam, who was polishing a white Cadillac in front of Baranco's purple house and who warned, "Vic doesn't like to speak with reporters." Yet as with the presidents of more conventional universities, Baranco has a curriculum vitae, however much he tries to hide it. More's founder was bora Wilbert V. Baranco in Oakland in 1934, the son of a black jazz pianist and a Jewish woman named Florida Mae. Baranco has claimed he was a gifted child but drummed out of Hebrew school because of "the black thing." He has also claimed he played in the 1954 Rose Bowl, but unfortunately Cal's squad didn't go to the Bowl that year. Author David Felton profiled Baranco in his 1972 book, Mindfitckers, and the portrait was far from flattering. As Felton explained: "Charles Manson, Victor Baranco and Mel Lyman, the superheroes of the following stories, are mindfuckers simply because they have made it their business to fuck men's minds and to control them. They ve succeeded by assuming godlike authority and using such mindfucking techniques as physical and verbal bullying and group humiliation." Baranco is the least well known of this threesome, but for all their other achievements, Manson and Lyman never established a school approved by the State of California to grant Ph.D.s in sex. Baranco earned his administrative credentials by joining the Sexual Freedom League in Berkeley in the' 60s Followers call Baranco Thought "responsible hedonism," but let Baranco explain: "It's like a boat. The woman is the steerer and the man is the motor. And once you can relax, men, and settle down into slavery in the motor room what a gas! They take care of you sexually, feed you and clothe you. They take care of all your creature comforts and all you gotta do is shovel coal." Felton portrays Baranco as a wheeler-dealer type, who along with Haight-Ashbury colleagues Robert Kerr and Paul Robbins set up the Institute for Human Abilities (IHA), a real estate corporation, in late Baranco and his pals bought derelict houses at low prices, got hippies to fix them up, then resold or rented the places at a handsome profit. But there was more to it than commerce. The partners also published Aquarius Magazine, which advertised courses such as "Basic Sensuality" and "A Weekend with Vic Baranco," both $45. Another subject of instruction was masturbation. According to Felton, Baranco and his followers had some doubts about intercourse. In the words of a man named Wayne, it is a "haphazard affair." Instead the institute recommended mutual masturbation as "a 'surefire way to a perfect orgasm every time.' He called it 'doing' the other person, and told us how to do a perfect 'do.' " The managing editor of Aquarius was a guy named Dewey, who ran the operation from a basement closet. Every month, Baranco would send in a taped "parable" for Dewey to transcribe and edit. Dewey said this was his "toughest task." One parable concerned a woman who for a 1ong time drove by a hitchhiker she saw every day, then finally decided to pick him up. He promptly killed her. ( There was no moral to the story," said Dewey, "but the heaviness was obvious.") Another parable was about "a bunch of wretched characters who lived in a concentration camp surrounded by squalor and barbed wire. There was no toilets, and their food was thrown on the ground with their shit. Every day an executioner would drag one of them to the chopping block and bloodily decapitate his in full view of the others." After several paragraphs of lurid description, it turned out the victims were actual chickens. By one account, Baranco was influenced by the Millionaire, a television program from the '50s in which a man of means gives away $ 1 million to a strange in each episode. Another influence came from the Lloyd Douglas novel, Magnificent Obsession, in which a character gives away the family fortune to the needy. Baranco established Turn On To America (TOTA), as Felton describes it. to collect government and foundation funds for alcoholics, nonplaceable foster children and paroles. B aranco acquired the 16-acre Lafayette spread currently houses More University in The grounds feature a main residence and houses, a studio, a house trailer, some shanties, tennis courts and assorted junk cars. The buildings are all painted a bright purple because that was the favorite color of Baranco s first wife Suzanne, whom he married in They bore two children then divorced in Suzanne, however continued to live on the Lafayette property, which neighbors call the "Purple Palace" and journalist have dubbed "Fuck U," a tag that fits in ways other than curriculum. The campus features a lookout tower and guardhouses at each entrance. Armed guards prowl the property and signs warn: "No trespassing, unless you want your feelings hurt" and "Only cowards commit suicide slowly. Members of More's paying student body arrive in purple Cadillac limousines and get around on campus in golf carts, which travel on paths paved with carpet remains. A 1978 More course catalog explains that the school was established in 1967 to "expand the physical, spiritual and intellectual capacities, with tolerance for all apparent alien encounters." But the prophet of responsible hedonism found that, even in swinging California, tolerance has limits. In 1978, according to the Contra Cost Times, the county sued and got a court order prohibits more than five unrelated people from living on the property. Baranco simply moved classes elsewhere, then moved

13 HETERODOXY PAGE 13 them back when a court of appeals overturned the ban. Also in 1978, Contra Costa County health officials reported that a three-year-old girl contracted gonorrhea while on the Lafayette property. No charges were brought, but the parents, who lived on campus, agreed to a $3,500 settlement with the county. That same year, Contra Costa sheriff's investigators said they had evidence that four men sexually molested two girls and a boy and that there had been illegal drug use at More. For reasons that remain unclear, the sheriffs called off the investigation, and there were no arrests or charges. That same year, during the apotheosis of alternative lifestyles under Governor Jerry Brown, Baranco applied to the California Department of Education for approval, which the state granted in 1979 despite the troubling sexual incidents. More University could now award academic degrees. According to Darlene Laval, who headed the state council that reviewed More in 1986, all one needed to do for approval at that time was show that they had a certain amount of money and a library, or access to one, "and that was about it." There was no review of the school's faculty, facilities, or curricula. State approval doubtless raised Baranco's self-esteem, even as it enhanced More's recruiting prospects. (Werner Erhard of EST fame even attended a Baranco class.) But approval did not eliminate the school's public-relations problems. Dr. Marc Hirsch had been serving as the head of More's Department of Medical Science. In 1980, California's Board of Medical Quality Assurance revoked Hirsch's license on the grounds that he had been prescribing excessive amounts of narcotics and mood-altering drugs. The same year Hirsch married Victor Baranco's exwife, Suzanne. During , More filed three lawsuits against the Contra Costa Times, which found the university a lively topic. Although all three suits were dismissed, the school's fondness for legal action was not diminished. Court records show that Baranco has been involved in nine lawsuits over property rights, including a long struggle with his own parents. The university recently filed a libel suit against the San Francisco Chronicle, which dubbed the school an "Academy of Carnal Knowledge." Still another suit involved Contra Costa County. During this tiff, More lawyer and longtime resident Richard Hyland said, "We'll consider suing everyone." After the suits against the Times were dismissed, More continued its affairs with little publicity. Indeed, few people in the Bay Area know such a place exists, even though it operates a sort of extension campus in the purple More house in San Francisco (although the city at one time shut down Baranco's houses and "sanctuary" programs fqr code violations). Throughout the mid- 1980s, Baranco was building up a faculty for his stateapproved operation. M ore's chief executive officer is Alexander Van Sinderen, 48, who majored in history at Stanford University, served in the Peace Corps from and did graduate work at Syracuse. Van Sinderen also holds a doctorate in lifestyles from More U. His dissertation was titled, "A Married Couple and a Single Woman as a Social and Sexual Unit." He and his wife live with a woman named Marilyn. Jackie Van Sinderen, 48, Alex's wife and More's dean of instruction, is also a veteran of Stanford, the Peace Corps and Syracuse. A press account identifies Jackie as a former member of More University's boxing team, which was discontinued several years ago. Suzanne Baranco Hirsch,55, received her doctorate in sensuality from More University in Thus qualified, she has since chosen to pursue a career as dean of More's Sensuality department. Former sociology major Cynthia Baranco, 40, married Victor Baranco in 1979 and now teaches at More and participates in Bay Area Mark Groups. More boasts a total of 34 faculty members, 15 of whom have doctorates one from UCLA and 14 from More. The state lists More's chief administrator as Lilyan Binder, 43, a graduate of Hunter College and a former mental health counselor. The courses offered at More include: Basic Hexing: This course describes hexing as a concep tual game that every human being plays, and of which a very few people are aware. It provides the student with the history, technique, structure and applications of hexing. The extent to which one can control his hexing is the extent to which one has power in his universe. (2 days; $250) Basic Oestrology: describes the frame of reference that explains human experience. ($300) Aphrodisid: Inhibited sexual desire is the most widely reported sexual difficulty in the nation today. "Aphrodisia" is a weekend of illuminating information and functional practices that provide the student with overt control over what is considered the most elusive aspect of sensual pleasuring. (Basic Sensuality and Basic Communication prerequisites; $360) Weekend with Vic: A totally unstructured weekend in which the instructor will answer any and all questions asked. The content of this course is totally dependent on the student's ability to have [sic]. (Prerequisite: 2 courses; $360) Mutual Pleasurable Stimulation of the Human Nervous System: A six-week course that meets for one three-hour session per week. Limited to married couples or consenting adults who agree to be laboratory partners for the duration of the course. Extensive examination of certain conditioned societal limitations on sensory awareness, including sex practices, partner exchange, emotional involvement related to sexing, oral-genital relationships. (Prerequisites: Basic and Advanced Sensuality; $375) Expansion of Sexual Potential: This program is designed to introduce the student to the nature of his/her own sexual potential. In a clinical setting, under the hands-on guidance of agreed-upon, selected members of the Department of Sensuality, individuals or couples are led in the exploration of the parameters of their sexual response. Social and sexual resistance to the expansion of this potential and its attendant terrors are identified, and appropriate methods of overcoming these barriers are demonstrated. Subjects are instructed in techniques of training partners in both causative and effective roles, and detailed methods for survival sex practices are presented. (5 prerequisites; $10,080) 11 of More's courses were designed by Victor Baranco, who has described the "mutual stimu-:ion" program as "making friends with another crotch." The Expansion of Sexual Potential includes a two-week stay at Lafayette and costs $16,800. According to state officials, More's entire doctoral program will set a student back $43,200. Just how much revenue the school brings in is not clear, however. The Contra Costa Times has reported that the various entities housed at More control $1.7 million in East Bay real estate and generate revenues of about $1 million. These "entities" are an interlocking directorate of non-profits including "Turn On To America" and "The Private Sector," which both deal with the homeless. To the Institute of Human Abilities Baranco has added Humore Inc., the real estate company in charge of the East Bay properties. Both Humore and the institute are run from a property on Purson Lane in Lafayette, one of several residences owned by Baranco. The Times has also reported that in 1990 More reported total income of $958,140, though it is not clear what came from where. Baranco's charitable impulses, some reporters discovered, did not extend to his parents. According to probate records, when Wilbert Baranco Sr. died in 1983, he disinherited his son. And when Victor's mother, Florida Mae, died in 1987, she left everything to Victor's two adult children. "As for our son," Florida Mae wrote, "he put us out of his life about 10 years ago. He didn't come to see his father before he died nor did he attend the funeral...he made it clear that he doesn't care about me." Baranco may have put his parents out of his life, but he could not permanently avoid the scrutiny of the state, which had allowed him to function in loco parentis for years on his Lafayette campus. By the

14 PAGE 14 MARCH 1994 mid-1980s, California had tightened its rules for private post-secondary education. A team of educational inspectors were preparing for their first trip to the purple palace, completely unaware of what they would find. "It was an eye-opener," says Darlene Laval, who chaired the state's regulatory council for five years and now works for the Department of Education as a consultant. In 1986 she and two colleagues spent two memorable days at More. "Here were all these old limos and people sitting around in their underwear peeling potatoes," says Laval, who describes the place as "really filthy," to the point that "I would hesitate to drink their coffee." A guy named Jim, Laval says, "came out of a building buckling his pants, followed by a woman, who was followed by a child." One of the teachers also turned out to be a student. "She said she had gotten her degree in sensuality and was now working on her other degree, for which she would have to spend a week with Vic," says Laval. "I said we need to talk to Vic, only to learn that he was 'too busy.' " To maintain approved status, schools must send in a lengthy self-study. More's version said in one place: "Equipment to take to class: a towel, a mirror, and all body parts." This caused review team member Roz Elms, who earned her Ph.D. at U.C. Berkeley, to crack, "Doesn't that discriminate against the handicapped?" When she learned of the "Weekend with Vic" course, Elms asked, "Is there a weekend with Vickie?" The inspection team wanted to see the classrooms and attend sessions. They were told they couldn't. In fact, says Laval, "They said none were being held. They said the classes were in Oakland." Aware of past com plaints against the school, the team wanted to see the nursery. They were told that it was closed that day because a child had fallen and was "on the verge of dying." But a staffer did let them see one building that contained a state-of-the-art video studio with a gyneco logical table as its centerpiece. "My mouth dropped," says Laval. She and Elhis, imaginations running wild, asked about the purpose of the table. They were told that this was where Vic "did his sessions" in front of the student body. As Laval recalls, "They had a library of tapes of things like 'Vic's birthday party.' There were hundreds of tapes, in order and labeled. This was the only library we found at the place." Neither was there any required reading. The team asked to see financial records. Such information was not available, they were told. "There was not one verification for any of the faculty," says Laval, "not one qualification for anything, let alone their speciality." The team then asked to read some theses and were handed a cardboard box containing eleven. "Most were handwritten and none was bound," says Laval. "One woman wrote that Vic had kept a stimulation of a student going for seven hours and why couldn't her boyfriend do this? This was her thesis." Roz Elms read a dissertation about sexual encounters titled "Recollections of a Married Couple and a Single Woman" and pronounced it "not original research." The paper was for a Ph.D, in Sensuality. Another paper was about pregnancy and contained nude photos. By now the state review team was finding it "hard to be professional," as Laval puts it, and feeling dirty to boot. "They stuck us in this one-room shack, and there was no way for us to talk without them hearing us. They made phone calls with a hand cupped over the receiver, like some B-movie." But the visitors had seen all they needed to see* More failed 108 out of 111 points of evaluation and the team recommended that approved status be denied. The council agreed, but More's lawyer showed up at the hearing and threatened Elms with a lawsuit for "lying" about the school and performing a "hatchet job." The school's advocate also charged that Laval "didn't know what she was talking about." More University appealed and won. California was then in the process of changing its regulatory system, and the procedures used to review More were never officially adopted. While new regulations were being drafted, California grandfathered in More and a number of other schools with questionable qualifications. More duly expanded its operations to New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta and other cities. ' >: T he Lafayette campus maintained an uneasy truce with neighbors until the university started to house the homeless in the early 1990s. One family whose property borders More reported constant noise and garbage, including hypodermic needles, being dumped over the fence. Yet when neighbors complained, More said that it was a witch-hunt caused by the long standing activism of Baranco and others at the university on behalf of the homeless. "They are hiding behind the politically correct stuff," says a woman who asked not to identified. "Nobody wants to be. against the homeless." Morehouse attorney Richard Hyland had learned another PC trick. He pointed out that Baranco was of "black-and Jewish heritage," and therefore the complaints were "based in racism." But, as it turned out, the homeless issue provided journalists with an opportunity to penetrate the purple curtain that had veiled More's inner doings for so long. On May 27, 1992, Donna Hemmila and Carolyn Leider, two reporters for the Contra Costa Times, showed up at More claiming they needed a place to stay. A man named "Joe without hair" let them in. They registered at Waipuna Lounge, a 24-hour diner for guests, and here their discoveries began. At More, the reporters learned, only first names are used. "Do you want clean underwear?" someone asked. Leider, who has examined the records of More's nonprofits in Sacramento, explains that More receives gen erous donations from corporations, including Jockey. The reporters also discovered that the campus had been upgraded since the 1986'site-review visit. It now boasted a closed circuit television system. On that evening's "news," the top story was a series of party scenes of a potbellied man dumping ice cubes down a woman's bikini, followed by safe sex tips and gossip. In another feature, a woman sang an off-key version of Peggy Lee's "Fever.". Those described as the campus' "elite" lived on the hill, and the reporters were warned not to get too close. But they did learn that the elite enjoy the service of female servants dressed in skimpy costumes, which they wear sans drawers in spite of Jockey's largesse. In addition to fashion, the faculty was also sensitive to nonhomeless visitors. "They let them in but videotape their every move," Leider says. The communards are also sensitive to communication. "You don't have any rights here," a More staffer named Tom barked when a homeless guy asked to use the phone. "So don't even think that you do." The reporters were the only female visitors in a room full of guys they didn't know, many smoking and drinking beer. The pair spent most of the night playing cards and bailed out early the next morning. John Koopman of the Contra Costa Times followed up on his colleagues' discoveries by attending a Basic Sensuality course with three other students: a dentist, an engineer and a veterinarian. The teacher was Joe Hills, who had the class talk about male and female genitalia and masturbation. He also asked them to strip and use mirrors to take a "visual inventory of [their] bodies." Homework questions asked whether they would have sex with men, midgets, paraplegics and animate. The course included a "do date," which, Koopman wrote, "usually consists of one person masturbating the other." When Dan Reed of the San Francisco Chronicle went to the More campus, they ushered him into a room with a conference table across from the Van Sinderen menage a trois. More staffers videotaped the entire interview, during which one of the scantily clad maids brought in water. Reed discovered that More uses its own currency, called "scrip," which was once old Pall Mall cigarette packs embossed with the university seal, but which now. resembles Monopoly money and is called "Karma Molecules." Allan Steele, a hypnotherapist from Coral Gables, Florida, who treats sexual disorders, said he and his wife Rochelle paid $47,500 to the university for doctorate courses. "While I was living on campus there was encouragement to use illegal drugs, including the availability to purchase illegal drugs," Steele wrote in an April 5, 1992, letter to the California Council for Private Postseeondary Education. "They also engage in prostitution," Steele added, "that is, sex for money, with quotas [of conquests], which if not met results in threats of physical violence and exclusion." Dan Reed reported that in late May 1992 the State Council demanded a response to the accusation but received none from More, which filed a $120 million libel suit against Steele. The hypnotist won't talk but stands by his allegations. More has also sued the Chronicle for libel, but the paper stands by its stories and has published no retraction. More's well-known litigiousness may have scared off A Current Affair, which was interested in doing a story on the university but wary of getting involved in a prolonged legal wrangle. The agency currently charged with protecting Californians from educational fraud is the Council for Private Postseeondary and Vocational Education (CPPVE), established in As its "fact sheet" says, the council certifies "that an institution meets minimum statutory standards for integrity, financial stability and educational quality, including the offering of bona fide instruction by qualified faculty and the appropriate assessment of students' achievement prior to, during and at the end of its program." Further there are "tuition refund formulas" should "the institution breach its contract with the students." The state considers the task of protecting consumers from educational fraud so important that it pays the council's director, Kenneth A. Miller, a handsome $82,000 a year plus benefits. Other professional staffers earn in the $60,000 range. As those who try to contact them will verify, these people spend a lot of time away from their desks or flying around the country to conferences. But although it has taken stands on issues involving race, and gender and multiculturalism in other institutions, the CPPVE has, to date, done nothing about More. "California is much more tolerant than the rest of the United States," explains the council's Ken Miller. "If something is legitimately new and innovative, they let it go ahead." Miller is vaguely aware of the sexual nature of the courses but allows that there has been "lots of research with Masters and Johnson." He has not visited the campus. Nor has the council's official in charge of More, Dr. Betty Sundberg, who, like Miller, was unaware of the 1986 report of state investigators Elms and Laval. Sundberg says that More University recently applied for renewal of its approved status, which must be recertified every five years. Another inspection team will soon be scheduled. Miller concedes that the process will be "interesting." Roz Elms is currently an administrator at the University of Northern Colorado. When she was told that, eight years after her site-review visit, this '60s timecapsule continues to grant degrees with the state of California's approval, she reacts with stunned disbelief and anger. "I'm appalled," Elms says. "I can't believe they didn't close that place," which she ranks with academic bottom-feeders such as acupuncture schools and "a guy who was granting doctorates out of a two-bedroom apartment." California educrats have made life difficult for a number of private schools, particularly religious schools, even those whose academic achievement is unquestioned and whose faculty -boast impeccable credentials. And yet the state has allowed More to thrive since 1979 fifteen years for the most part undisturbed. Bureaucratic indifference and ineptitude alone cannot explain More's incredible longevity. California's approval of More stands as a symbol of how American society has been baptized in the ethos of the '60s, An institution like More University could only thrive in the kind of society the '60s helped to create, a society in which, as the late Malcolm Muggeridge put it, "sex is the only mysticism." BY K.L BILLINGSLEY

15 HETERODOXY PAGE 15 DEBUNKING RELATIVISM Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony By Robert B. Edgerton, Reviewed by Glynn Custred Maxwell Macmillian International, 278 pp., $24.95 Characteristic of the thinking and rhetoric of the cultural left are two sharply opposed social types. On the one hand there are small scale, face-to-face folk communities that are inherently harmonious, stable and satisfying to their members, while on the other there is Western Civilization which is inherently alienating, vicious and rapacious, a society that demeans its members and corrupts and destroys the innocent communities with which it comes in contact. A good example of this stereotype is Kirkpatrick Sale's The Conquest of Paradise, a polemic against Christopher Columbus, and thus against Western Civilization. Sale depicts pre-contact Indians as members of idyllic "primal communities" living "harmonious, peaceful, benign and content" in an ecological paradise until Columbus brought the wickedness of the West to their shores to wantonly destroy them and to disrupt the harmony of nature. Left out of Sale's depiction is the extinction of entire species, such as the horse and the camel, in large part due to the hunting practices of the first Americans, something archaeologists have called the "Pleistocene Overkill." Also left out of Sale's picture of primeval harmony are the warfare, cannibalism and bondage that characterized much of Native America long before Columbus ever sailed from Spain. Edgerton' s numerous examples are presented not as an indictment of old societies or as a vindication of modern Western culture. All he is doing is exposing the myth of primitive harmony and the simplistic notion of relativism on which it rests. In its place, he suggests that we examine customs in terms of their degree of adaptability, using such measures as to what extent societies or traditions ensure the survival of cultures and populations, to what extent they advance the population's physical well-being and to what degree they contribute to people's satisfaction with their lives. The crude stereotypes of the Noble Savage and the Wicked West have, recently emerged in revisionist versions of the western. A striking example is the Academy Awardwinning film Dances with Wolves. This story of a deserter from civilization who finds primal happiness among the Sioux tells us far more about trendy Hollywood in the 1990s than it ever could about the real Plains Indians of the 1860s. What is most disturbing about this reductionist, and thus misrepresentative, image of culture and history is that it is gaining ground in our educational institutions under the rubrics of "diversity" and "multiculturalism;" The scholarly discipline best positioned to debunk this stereotype is social and cultural anthropology. Yet because anthropologists are caught up in a folk culture of their own, they are very often incapable of clear thinking about true cultural variability; in fact, they help create the cultural cliches described above* An essential part of anthropological inquiry is the adoption of a kind of cultural relativity, in the sense of trying to understand another society on its own terms and to see it from the perspective of those who live in it. Another important part of anthropology is functionalism, the examination of interrelationships among customs and practices and how they help populations adapt to their conditions. When properly brought together, anthropologist Robert B. Edgerton observes, cultural relativity and functionalism can "produce finely textured portraits of life in other cultures" and provide "the essential descriptive material without which neither cultural comparison nor evaluation can take place." Unfortunately, what characterizes much of anthropology today is not cultural relativity or functionalism properly understood, but rather a simplified relativism that precludes evaluation and a naive assumption that just because an institution or custom exists in a society, it must necessarily be adaptive. Thus anthropologists have interpreted customs such as torture, female genital mutilation, human sacrifice, etc., in ways that sometimes contradict the very data presented in their ethnographies. In fact, anthropologists have gone so far in this respect that Arthur Hippler has criticized them for regarding "anything and everything done in some non-western culture...as good or at least neutral, [while] everything done in or by Western society is somehow bad." In the same vein, W.E. Washburn has attributed the "continuing power" of cultural relativism to the hostility shown by anthropologists towards the values of their own society. Finally, however, a rioted anthropologist, Robert B. Edgerton of the University of California Los Angeles, has come along to challenge these popular myths in his book Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony. Edgerton notes the success of modern societies in feeding-; their people and in maintaining their health. "The average life expectancy in the United States, Japan and Europe," he writes, "is more than twice that ever attained by any folk society and indeed three times that of many." In contrast to this achievement, he cites the Siriano, a foraging people of eastern Bolivia. The Siriano are often hungry and cold, and they suffer from malaria and skin disease, hookworm, dysentery and other maladies caused by malnutrition and a primitive technology. The Siriano have no remedies against snakebite and other dangers they face every day nor do they have surgical skills. They cannot even set broken bones, their, sick are left unattended and exposed to the cold and the rain and their children are permitted to play with their feces. It's hard to see how any of this can be considered adaptive. An example of a practice that is plainly maladaptive is found among East African pastdralists. These people do not remove flies from the eyes of their children because they associate flies with the feces of cattle, and cattle represent wealth. So the children are at serious risk of blindness caused by fly-borne trachoma. "The benefit to a society of blind children is not self evident," notes Edgerton. Some dietary practices also contribute to unnecessarily high mortality rates. One example is the eating of cattle that have died from anthrax; another is the Inuit (Eskimo) habit of eating seal blubber raw rather than cooked, thus causing the death of countless people from botulism. Edgerton also cites vital statistics for the male dominated and warlike Yanomamo of the Amazon jungle, where.43 percent of all females born alive die before their first year (perhaps as many as half due to female infanticide) and where only 22 percent of the entire population lives beyond the age of 30. The rate is even lower among the Xavante of Brazil, where only about 15.4 percent lived past 30. Clearly, customs in these societies have not served their people well. The pre-contact Aztecs provide another case. Aztecs waged constant war against their neighbors, not for territory, but rather for captives whom they sacrificed to their demanding gods. Aztec priests would cut out the living hearts of their victims, then topple their bodies down the steep pyramid steps to be butchered, seasoned, cooked and eaten, apparently with relish. Perhaps some case can be made for the adaptiveness of these customs in terms of the accumulation of power and wealth by the Aztec elite, but little advantage can be seen for those neighboring societies that furnished literally thousands of victims each year for Aztec sacrifices. People from the societies thus exploited eagerly joined the Spaniards against their oppressors. Another example of a maladaptive custom is the kind of cannibalism practiced by thetonkawa of Central Texas. This custom served no ceremonial purpose, but was instead pursued for the enjoyment of eating human flesh. Other tribes were repulsed by the custom and eventually joined together against the Tonkawa in a war in which half the Tonkawa population was slaughtered. Cannibalism was therefore far from adaptive for those who practiced it. Human sacrifice is another custom that is hard to justify. Edgerton gives the example of the Skidi Pawnee of Nebraska who, in order to propitiate the Morning Star, would regularly torture and kill a child. Other tribes which, like the Pawnee, had adapted to the Great Plains did not adopt such a ritual. The great majority of the people of the world have engaged in warfare and feuding. The result is often high levels of stress for those involved, and in some cases serious disruptions and the depletion of population. The Kaingang of the Amazon jungle are a case in point: their feuding eventually reduced the population by 75 percent. Anthropologist Jules Henry has described their pattern of behavior as "cultural suicide." Another people on the way to selfannihilation before contact with Europeans stopped the process were the Kaiadit of Native Australia. The purpose of the feuds that characterized their society was a struggle over women, not for their economic value, but rather for sex. As Edgerton puts it, "Kaiadit men killed other Kaiadit men in order to take their women." Edgerton cites another instructive example, the Marind-amin of New Guinea. There, a bride was forced to have multiple intercourse on her wedding night with the groom's kinsmen, a practice repeated at various intervals during her life. This resulted in a high rate of severe pelvic inflammatory disease and, as a consequence, sterility. One way of maintaining their numbers was to raid neighboring communities, where the heads of the men were taken as trophies and the children carried away to be raised as Marind-amin. What these and other examples show is that the natural harmony of folk societies is a myth and that many beliefs and practices can often lead to serious problems, in some cases even to the demise of the community itself. Edgerton also notes that people in folk communities are not uniformly content with their customs. For example, many Bimin-Kuskusmin of Africa told anthropologist Fitzjohn Poole that although they took part in socially proper cannibalistic practices, they were nonetheless ambivalent towards the custom, while some even expressed "horror and disgust at their own acts." They said that "they had been unable to engage in the act, had not completed it, had vomited or even fainted, or had hidden the prescribed morsel and had lied about consuming it." Many Yanomano said they disliked the perennial warfare which characterized their culture, and the women of the Mae Enga people of New Guinea said that they detested the warfare practiced by their men. Chronic warfare was a prominent fact of life in highland New Guinea before it was banned by a colonial government, and afterwards many men freely admitted that "they had been terribly afraid when there had been warfare and that their lives were better since the government had prevented it." There is also the example of a Pawnee chief who took steps oh his own, without outside influence, to end the torture and killing of children in the Morning-Star ceremony. And then there is the example of Tecumseh, the Shawnee war chief who attempted to rally the Woodlands Indians against white encroachment in the early nineteenth century. Tecumseh, a great warrior and a remarkable man by any standard, was disgusted with the practice of torturing captured enemies. As a youth he spoke out against it, saying that there was no honor in torturing to death a helpless prisoner. What all this shows, says Edgerton, is that the "people in small, traditional societies object to some aspects of their culture, just as people do in complex, postindustrial societies like our own." Moreover, customs may be questioned, criticized and eventually abandoned in such communities as indeed they often are in modern society. This presents us with a picture of human beings that are far more similar than the relativists would have us believe. Sick Societies is a refreshing and much needed book, a welcome antidote to the debased cultural relativism now widespread both in popular culture and in educational institutions. GLYNN CUSTRED is a professor of anthropology at\calstate Hay ward.

16 Paolo Casorti International Cello Competition Announces Winner by JUDITH SCHUMANN WEIZNER Ellie Susstraum has been awarded first prize in the Sixth Paolo Casorti International Cello Competition. The thirty-six year old woman is the oldest person ever to have won the prestigious quadrennial contest since its inception in At Carnegie Hall today, Ms. Susstraum was presented with fifty thousand dollars and the use of the Stradivari cello, that the Paolo Casorti Foundation lends to the winner for the four-year period between competitions. The foundation will also finance her future New York Philharmonic debut. Ms. Susstraum's inspiring journey to the winner's circle was an arduous one, following her near-miraculous recovery from injuries sustained in an accident six years ago. At that time, Ms. Susstraum was a doctoral student in ethnomusieology at the Grove School of Music of Manhattan University, For her thesis she had undertaken to learn to play every musical instrument native to Uzbekistan prior to the Second World War and to write a book of instruction for each one in the hope of stimulating interest in those instruments among the public at large. Additionally, she secured a commission to write concertos for the various instruments, which she performed with the Grove School of Music Orchestra in a series of concerts held in Carnegie Hall. Critics hailed her as a genius of unusual breadth, citing the stylistic variety of the concertos as well as the sensitivity of her performances. While preparing for one of these concerts, Ms. Susstraum, having arrived early for a rehearsal, heard an instrument being practiced backstage. Intrigued by the plaintiveness of its upper register, which seemed the perfect vehicle to give voice to the yearning of the oppressed, she inquired what the instrument was. Told that it was a cello, she decided on the spot to search for a cello teacher when she was hit by a taxi while crossing the street. The accident condemned her to eight months in traction, followed by four months of physical therapy at the Institute for Rehabilitation. As soon as she was discharged from the Institute, she undertook a project that had taken shape in her mind during her long convalescence. Having read extensively about liability law to help pass the time in traction, she filed suit against the taxi driver, the taxi company and the City of New York for recovery of expenses incurred due to the accident, as well as compensation for pain and suffering. Although several witnesses testified that she had entered the crosswalk against the light and had stopped in the middle of the intersection to examine a run in her panty hose, the jury was quick to award her compensation for her medical expenses. The issue of pain and suffering was somewhat thornier. She based her claim on the contention that due to the accident she could not play the cello. The defendant's attorney pointed out that Ms. Susstraum, as far as anyone knew, had never even held a cello, so it wasn't surprising that she couldn't play one. Ms. Susstraum was able to prove, however, that she had been considering studying the cello for over two years and, basing her argument on the hitherto little-known precedent established in Sacrevache v. Hudson River Employment Agency, in ELLIE SUSSTRAUM which the loss of a long-held dream was deemed grounds for compensation, she was able to convince the jury to award her $4.5 million as balm for her disappointment. This award afforded Ms. Susstraum the financial freedom to have a cello customized to suit her unusual physical needs. Since her left arm can no longer open out from the elbow, she designed and patented a motorized, pedal-operated device that moves the cello back and forth to compensate for her inability to draw the bow across the strings. The 1994 Paolo Casorti International Cello Competition, the first to be held under the federal Guidelines for Artistic Contests that will apply to all such events by the end of 1997, has been hailed as the world's first truly humane musical competition. (While the event is still referred to by its old name, Casorti Foundation directors must find a designation for the 1998 International Paolo Casorti Cello Competition that will more accurately reflect its nature.) The guidelines were imposed by the Federal Health Administration after a study showed that such competitions often resulted in an increase in medical costs as non-winners sought psychological counseling to restore their damaged self-esteem. A panel of contest sponsors and government officials working together developed the guidelines as way of awarding prizes without fostering a climate of competition. In the past, young artists were judged on the basis of such criteria as accuracy of pitch and rhythm, tonal beauty, stylistic appropriateness, interpretive imagination and stage presence. The panel, after hearing extensive testimony, concluded that while such things as pitch and rhythm could be judged by somewhat objective standards, the very act of forcing people of artistic temperament to conform to these external standards could be a cause of severe stress. The panel also concluded that judgement of more subjective matters such as beauty of tone and interpretation were likely to be too vague, promoting confusion in the young musicians who could never be sure exactly what was expected of them. The panel also found that any of these factors could be affected by a participant's state of mind, health or preparedness, giving an unfair advantage to those who had slept well the night before the competition. Like-. wise, inequalities of physique, talent and musical training could favor the physically or musically gifted and the financially well-off. Accordingly, when this year's competition was announced, no criteria for entry were given. The sole requirement was submission of an essay entitled "Why I Want to Enter the Sixth Paolo Casorti International Cello Competition." From among the 3,000 entrants, 30 semi-finalists were chosen at random and given the option of playing a recital. The atmosphere was electric at Carnegie Hall last evening when Ms. Susstraum was declared the winner after a paper bearing her name was drawn from a fishbowl containing the names of all 30 semifinalists. In addition to making history as the oldest winner of the first non-competition contest, Ms. Susstraum is also making history as the first winner of the Paolo Casorti International Cello Competition who has never actually played the cello. "Getting hit by that cab was the best thing that ever happened to me," Ms. Susstraum said in an interview in the green room today. "It gave me graphic proof that the most important thing in life is to pursue one's dream no matter how impossible it may seem." JUDITH SCHUMANN WEIZNER'S last piece appeared in our January issue.