The fact is—and it is a fact—the American people will not exact a token of punishment from a woman who seeks an abortion. Shouldn’t this tell opponents of abortion rights something very basic? It tells me that the criminal code is not the right instrument here. We shouldn’t be trying to use it for the basic reason that even most of those Americans who count themselves “pro-life” don’t see going to get an abortion as a crime.
Shouldn’t these basic semantic difficulties tell you something? Advocates are wary of saying the word “abortion” while opponents use the word “murder” but are wary of calling it a crime. In both cases, what actually points the way toward common ground are the messages behind the language.
I think the only way to reduce the number of abortions in the country dramatically is for the opponents of abortion rights to find common ground with those who think the final decision over abortion should remain constitutionally protected.
There are other ways to cut down on the number of abortions without outlawing them. And since abortion is not going to be outlawed, those other ways are the only ways we have.
I remember Clinton promising to make abortion “safe, legal, and rare.” Still needed is a president who will make—and keep—such a promise.
Gay Rights
Anyone who defends job discrimination against gays should ask himself: If you don’t let gay men and women provide for themselves, who should do it for them? Those who oppose civil unions among gay people should ask themselves: Aren’t we better off having gay people involved in strong, enduring, recognized relationships than the alternative?
I give Bill Clinton credit here. He is the first president in history to openly acknowledge gay people as part of the American family. Just by showing up in 1997 at the national meeting of the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s premier gay and lesbian rights organization, he made a lot of Americans feel very good about themselves. And I think Vice-President Cheney, whose daughter is openly gay, would publicly agree with that objective.
I once spoke to the annual dinner of the Log Cabin Club, a national organization of gay Republicans. The men I met that evening were proud, committed members of the GOP—and the GOP should be proud to have them.
The Gender Gap
Fifty-one percent of men voted for George W. Bush in the last election, just 43 percent for Albert Gore. Fifty percent of women voted for Gore, just 43 percent for Bush. I have an explanation for this breakdown. It has to do with interests.
First, let me identify those interests. Ask a man what shots his kids have had. What are their teachers’ names? Who telephones the grandparents more often? He or his wife? Second, who goes around the house at night obsessively turning out lights? Who goes downstairs to check when someone hears a floor creak?
The answers go a long way toward explaining why women voters tend to vote for the Democratic candidate. Their focus is on health, education, Medicare, and Social Security. Women are nowhere as obsessed as men with saving nickels on electricity or going around locking doors. Those are the kinds of details, however, that dads pass on to their sons.
Our parties, echoing the society that gave rise to them, seem each to have a gender identity. We have the Democratic party that backs the teachers’ unions, cares for our education and our health care and sees that grandparents receive their Social Security and Medicare. We have the Republican party that backs big Pentagon budgets, protects the rights of gun owners, backs stiff sentences for criminals, and cuts taxes. We have a “mommy” party and a “daddy” party, each servicing its constituent voters.
AIDS in Africa
Father Angelo D’Agostino, a Jesuit priest, opened Nairobi’s Nyumbani Orphanage for HIV-positive children in 1981 when he saw so many HIV-positive children being turned away by other orphanages. Today he is housing and caring for seventy-plus orphans while getting daily medication, clothing, and food to hundreds more who live in surrounding areas.
Kathy, our kids, and I visited Father Dag, as he’s known, in summer 1999.
In treating, feeding, raising, and cheering these kids, who range from newborns to teenagers, this seventy-three-year-old Jesuit priest from Providence, Rhode Island, knows that he swims in a roiling sea of need. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest density of AIDS cases in the world. In Kenya there will be 150,000 HIV-positive orphans by next year. There might be another 200,000 who are not born HIV-positive, but since their mothers died of AIDS, they will live under the stigma of the disease; unwanted by their relatives, they will have no place to live.
With all the love and commitment they receive, however, the prognosis for such orphans is brutally predictable. Nyumbani has no way to afford the high-priced drug cocktails developed for those who are HIV-positive.
“Some chemists are threatening to synthesize the drugs,” Father Dag speculates. “What would happen if such companies did manufacture and distribute them at an affordable price? Would the American companies sue them?”
In the meantime, this kindly, thoughtful priest, who was an Air Force surgeon, a psychiatrist, and a refugee worker in his previous life, raises what money he can to give scores of children the best, happiest lives possible.
Swaziland, the country where I served in the Peace Corps, has faced the oppression of apartheid on one border, stubborn Portuguese colonialism on another. Today it is staring at a specter more tragic and more deadly: AIDS. The numbers are staggering. Swaziland has just over a million people. A quarter of them are HIV-positive.
“The situation is quite bad,” Ambassador to the U.S. Mary Kanya explains. “Swaziland is number three among the sub-Sahara countries hardest hit. In our hospitals, fifty percent of the people are HIV-positive.” And the epidemic is not limited to the poor. “It’s hit a cross section,” she says, offering the sad accounting. “We’re losing some of the most productive population of the country.”
“For a long time,” she continues, “we have been in denial. The people have been unable to accept the problem. We looked at AIDS as a foreign problem, involving white people, foreign people. Secondly, we saw it as a problem for homosexuals, which we thought was not really a problem for us. Then, when it hit Africa, people looked at AIDS as a problem to the north and east. When it made it to Zimbabwe, we thought it was a problem that was on the other side of the Limpopo [the river separating Zimbabwe from South Africa].”
Like Zimbabwe, Botswana, and other countries in southern Africa, Swaziland is now suffering the full force of the AIDS virus. Life expectancy, which had risen for twenty years, has reverted to its colonial-era standard.
While Ambassador Kanya admits that the “denial is not yet over” in her country, her people clearly are waking up to the AIDS horror, and beginning to talk openly about it.
So is the world. In the last year of his vice-presidency, speaking at the United Nations, Al Gore noted the dire statistic that more people will die from this disease in the coming decade than from all the wars of the twentieth century.
Seventeen million dead! Twenty-five million mortally wounded!
If Europe were hit with such ghastly casualties, would America be sitting on the sidelines? If the lands of white America’s roots—England, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Poland—faced a global predator capable of such horror, would we avert our glance?
You, the reader: As in 1914 and 1939, this country would be hot with debate: What should we do? How could we best help our friends fight this murderous fiend?
I speak, for those still unaware, not of Europe at the advent of World War I or II but of sub-Saharan Africa at the outbreak of World War III. What will America do this time? Will we wait, as we did in the years before Pearl Harbor, hoping the danger might be arrested somewhere beyond our shores?
Secretary of State Colin Powell has spoken wisely: “AIDS is a national security problem. It is a devastating problem in sub-Saharan Africa. Millions of people are at risk. Millions of people will die no matter what we do. This creates a major problem for Africa and other parts of the worl
d where AIDS is spreading. It is a pandemic. It requires our attention, and Congress has to be generous.”
The question is whether President Bush’s strategies will apply this “Powell doctrine” as they are morally bound to. Can we show the muscle to fight AIDS in Africa the same way we confronted Saddam Hussein in the Persian Gulf? And will it be backed up by a campaign to build the necessary popular support here at home?
So far, the only government battalions fighting on the front lines have been dispatched by the Peace Corps. Intrepid volunteers in South Africa, Lesotho, and neighboring nations are teaching men how to use condoms and women how to resist them when they don’t. They are helping the orphans of AIDS victims learn work skills to help ensure their survival. Beyond their assigned jobs, many Peace Corps volunteers are providing care to the HIV-infected themselves.
For Powell and for President Bush, the question is: Who will lead this fight in Africa? If not the United States, this country of huge medical might and historic wealth, then who? And if AIDS in Africa is a threat to our national security, as Powell has determined, who should carry the U.S. banner?
I suggest President Bush’s predecessor, William Jefferson Clinton. His new offices in Harlem would give him an excellent command post from which to champion the American campaign against a global menace that is killing in greater numbers and at greater efficiency than Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini combined.
Bullfighting
I began this chapter by saying that the easiest story to report is the expected, popular version of events. The most controversial is the unexpected, when you find out something you didn’t expect—or didn’t want—to discover.
In 1990 I went to a Spanish bullfight expecting—wanting—to celebrate the spectacle made famous in the English-speaking world by one of its greatest writers. It didn’t turn out that way. Yet my report on the day’s events produced more reader reaction, pro and con, than any column I’ve written before or since.
Death in the Afternoon
BARCELONA, JULY 22, 1990. In his famous guide to the Spanish bullfight, Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway wrote of a classic, if tragic, struggle between man and bull.
This is not what I saw here last Sunday at the Plaza de Toros. Expecting to see a one-on-one contest, I witnessed a series of gang attacks on a half-dozen extremely confused animals.
As is the custom, six bulls were killed that Sunday. I saw none die in the quick and dramatic fashion celebrated in Death in the Afternoon. I can assure you none died “swaying on his legs before going up in his back with four legs in the air.” No, it was different than that.
The bulls killed here in last Sunday’s Corida de Toros met their ends neither quickly nor dramatically. The first bull to enter the ring died the fastest. After taking the full length of the matador’s sword in his back, the huge animal wandered dismally around the edge of the ring for several minutes before collapsing. It was not clear what reaction was expected from the crowd during this death walk. My own initial impulse, which I did not follow, was to bolt for the exit stairs mouthing my opinion all the way about this pastime the Spanish consider a sport.
I was wrong to judge the bullfight by a single killing. Each of the other five bulls to enter the ring died even more grotesquely than the first. The second to take the matador’s blade roamed the full circumference of the ring after being stabbed, all the while spewing blood through his mouth like a fire hose.
The death of the other four bulls was more complicated. Not being an aficionado, I assumed this was due to the clumsiness of the matadors.
Instead of doing their work with a single thrust, they spent the afternoon sticking as many as three separate swords into their assigned bulls.
Each time the huge wounded animal would run madly for its life like the Saturday morning cartoon character who runs off the cliff but fails to fall because he doesn’t look down.
Hemingway was right about one thing. You know nothing of your true reaction to a bullfight until you have seen one of those once-ferocious animals, a first or second or even third sword run clear through him, still managing to challenge the bullfighters surrounding him. You know nothing of your reaction to the bullfighters themselves until you have watched the matador and his coterie of banderilleros pursuing and harassing these dying bulls until they can run no more.
Then there is the real dirty work of the modern Spanish bullfight—the coup de grace. This is when one of the banderilleros takes out a penknife, stabs the wounded bull between the eyes and then sticks the blade into the animal’s ear and gouges him to death as if he were a young boy cutting the core from an apple.
There is something else I saw and learned in the greatly sunny Plaza de Toros Monumental last Sunday.
The bullfight is not, as it is so often advertised in movies and literature, some great heroic test of wits between man and beast. The whole tragedy of the bullfight—the animals charging into the ring, the teasing by the banderilleros, the brutal lancing by the mounted picadors, the insertion of the painful banderillas, the cape work by the matador and the slow final butchering—is less a one-on-one affair and more a gangland-style execution.
From the time the bull enters the scene he is relentlessly harassed and confused by the banderilleros, either standing in the ring itself or teasing him and taunting him from behind.
Even when the matador stood alone in the ring, his banderilleros regularly worked to distract the bull. The second the matador got in trouble, every time a bull turned too abruptly toward him or failed to follow his cue, the matador’s claque of banderilleros would emerge from behind the fence to lure the bull away and their boss to safety.
Even after the sword or several swords had been plunged full-length into the animal, the matador’s lieutenants continued to harass and distract the bull.
This confusion and humiliation of the bull gives some support, I suppose, to the tragedy. How much easier it is to butcher a beast once he has been made to look stupid.
But if the bull were so stupid, why is so much effort made to keep him confused throughout this so-called sporting activity? If he is so lacking in basic intelligence, why is the fighting bull kept from the sight of a dismounted man until he enters the ring to be killed in the first place?
And if the bull requires so much effort to be confused and subdued, why is he the worthy object of so much of our torture?
Ronald Reagan
I first met Ronald Reagan in Speaker O’Neill’s ceremonial office. The Secret Service was keeping him there while its dogs sniffed for bombs under the seats on the House floor.
“Welcome, Mr. President, to the room where we plot against you!” I said upon entering.
“Not after six,” our guest responded without hesitation. “The Speaker says that here in Washington we’re all friends after six!”
Yes, it really happened that way. I was that imprudent and Ronald Reagan was that masterful in taking command.
Like other Hollywood actors, Reagan was a tougher, more on-guard character than one would assume from his breezy public personality. The man you met then was not the beneficiary of his seemingly golden circumstances but rather the chief protector of his own charmed life. He was the combatant who knows, without needing a warning, just when he has entered the enemy’s lair.
An hour after my brash greeting, a hundred million Americans turned on their television sets to watch this apparently easygoing fellow with his crease of a grin.
The Ronald Reagan there in the Speaker’s room was the guy who had survived his divorce from Jane Wyman, the decline of his movie career, the cancellation of his TV show, and the cruel social downgrading that rides shotgun on such defeats. He was the quick-on-his-feet orator who had defeated Bobby Kennedy in debate before the Oxford Union. He was the no-nonsense boss who fired thirteen thousand striking U.S. air traffic controllers. He was the political street fighter who got up off the dirt to win the 1976 North Carolina primary when nearly everybody counted him for dead. He was the col
d-blooded combatant who strode to the podium of the 1976 Republican convention and delivered such a barn-burner it made people wonder what Gerald Ford, the party nominee, was doing on the stage.
Like millions who watched television in the 1950s, I had gotten to know and like Reagan during his eight years hosting the old General Electric Theater. Every Sunday night at nine, he would warmly greet his huge primetime audience and introduce the forthcoming story. Occasionally, he himself would star. Like most baby boomers I knew nothing of his earlier movie career. Only later would I learn that he had played the Notre Dame football hero George Gipp in Knute Rockne: All American. To me, Ronald Reagan was simply the guy I shared my Sunday evenings with. Like Sid Caesar and Steve Allen and Johnny Carson, he was one of those TV people about whom one could say I forged a bond. I think millions of people did.
This is where the professionals blew it. To Pat Brown, the Democratic California governor Reagan unseated in 1966, Ronald Reagan was just a “B-movie actor,” a guy who turned out serviceable second-rate movies for the double features people often went to see before television came along.
I think Tip O’Neill, for all his insider’s street smarts, shared this miscalculation. He and the others didn’t see the brilliant outsider’s game Reagan was playing. His Democratic rivals saw Reagan simply as a minor-league movie star, when actually television had turned him into something more. He wasn’t some guy playing a character in the movies, but rather one we had invited into our homes each Sunday night. Looking back on his defeat years later, Pat Brown would realize that in the voter’s mind, Reagan was always one of “us,” while he was always one of “them.”
Ronald Reagan came across as the classic American populist challenging the halls of entrenched authority. He, the kid who’d grown up believing in the New Deal, was now the soft-spoken revolutionary opposed to big government. He spoke not only for Republicans, but for all Americans, optimistic about what man can do if left to be free. He may never have played “Mr. Smith” but he out-acted Jimmy Stewart in the long run—which is to say, he got to live the part.
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 162