by John Leonard
There hadn’t been a more depressing program on television since Edward R. Murrow’s Harvest of Shame. Until, that is, May 1995, the very next month, when HBO aired its McMartin docudrama, Indictment. Enter Oliver Stone, executive producer. And Abby and Myra Mann, who wrote an angry script in the best tradition of TV agitprop. And Mick Jackson, directing in the slam-bang take-no-prisoners style of Stone himself. And James Woods as Danny Davis, a lowlife lawyer more accustomed to defending “drug dealers and other scumbags,” who would seem to have ennobled himself by representing three generations of McMartins. And Mercedes Ruehl, as the prosecutor who would do anything to advance the political ambitions of her DA boss. Not to mention a strong supporting cast that included Lolita Davidovich as a therapist who coached the children at their confabulations; Chelsea Field as a member of Ruehl’s team who began to have doubts; Sada Thompson as the grandmother Virginia McMartin; Shirley Knight as her daughter Peggy; and Henry Thomas as her grandson Ray, who forgot sometimes to put on his underwear and was caught with a skin-mag centerfold.
Well, they looked guilty: “Perfect typecasting,” said a prosecutor; “they could be Buchenwald guards.” So what if their accuser was a hysterical alcoholic who may have been covering up for her own abusive husband? So what if the prosecutors neglected to screen the unlicensed therapist’s videotaped interviews with the kids? So what if that therapist misrepresented the contents of those interviews besides sleeping with a tabloid-TV reporter and feeding him pillow-talk scoops? And so what if sad-sack Ray spent five years in jail before getting bail? “A client’s a client,” explained Woods in his Salvador/True Believer raw-meat mode, before he saw beyond the lizard eye of law as usual to the light of a just cause like a moral corona. No medical evidence of any variety of abuse at the McMartin Preschool was ever produced in court, not a single porn Polaroid, not a single sighting of an underground satanic cavern, nor the least residue of hot wax and singed fur. And who was to blame for these witch hunts? According to Indictment: parents, cops, prosecutors, therapists, and the vampire media.
To which list, according to Frederick Crews in two long articles in the New York Review of Books in 1994, we must add Sigmund Freud. An emeritus professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, Crews had been hounding in hot pursuit after Freud for years, to punish him for the many sins of a subdivision of literary criticism bent out of shape by psychoanalytic concepts. To be sure, Crews was equally disdainful of Marxist, feminist, structuralist, and postmodern literary criticism—those kaleidoscopic lenses through which the trendier academics are accustomed to peering at every artifact of the culture in order to find it guilty of something. But the “recovered memory” controversy was a chance to up the animus ante. Feminists had an investment in the incidence of incest. Fundamentalist Christians had an investment in the existence of satanic ritual. And therapists had an investment in vulgarized Viennese voodoo. In this conspiracy of true believers, the victims weren’t texts; the victims were families and careers and human rights and common sense—all because of “recovered memory” techniques based on a theory of repression for which, like psychoanalysis as a whole, there was no empirical evidence and, thus, no scientific validation.
We would seem to have strayed from two-dimensional television into a swamp. Well, you can’t watch television, raise children, think about Freud, and fend off Frederick Crews, all at the same time, without starting to suspect that the culture’s constituents connect, collide, and ramify in messy ways, and that interrelatedness may be the normal respiration of intelligence. In May 1996 the New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to swatches of wounding memoirs by writers like Susan Cheever, Mary Gordon, Mary Karr, Chang-rae Lee, Leonard Michaels, Joyce Carol Oates, Luc Sante, and Art Spiegelman. The editor of this special issue, James Atlas, seemed mildly susprised to find so much emphasis on dysfunction, alcoholism, incest, and mental illness. He seemed also to blame the contemporary novel, for no longer “delivering the news.” He simply hadn’t been watching much television. He might also have been reading the wrong novels.
When Crews at last published his essays in a book, The Memory Wars, in the fall of 1995, I put on another of my hats, as coeditor of the literary pages of The Nation, and shipped it out for review, along with Satan’s Silence, to an anthropologist at the University of Washington. What we got back from Marilyn Ivy and published that December still strikes me as the sanest take on the topic so far. After synopsizing both books, Ivy used them as booster rockets. So psychoanalysis isn’t scientific? Well, we have known for years “about the tension in Freud between his interpretive modalities and his scientism….” Nevertheless:
Crews’ Popperian valorization of science makes him uncomfortable indeed with ambiguity, not to mention undecidability. He can only imagine two alternatives: that there is real sexual abuse, or that psychotherapists plant false memories of abuse in children’s (or “recovering” adults’) minds. Having foresworn the murky depths of interpretation in favor of the transparent verifiability of science, he has no way to think about phenomena that don’t readily resolve themselves into the stable objects of real science but that remain unstable para-objects: memory, sexuality, desire, and terror. It’s true that we wouldn’t have recovered memory therapy as it is today if Freud hadn’t theorized repression…. [But] we also wouldn’t have had a body of thought, with its still discomfiting assertions of child sexuality and the reality of fantasy, that directly disputes the primitive premises on which that therapy is based.
As Nathan and Snedeker suggest in Satan’s Silence, what is also going on is “the systematic, class-based scapegoating of people who represent the intersection of the public sphere with the (ideally) privatized, sacrosanct sphere of the family: caretakers in day-care centers. In a nation in which an increasing number of women work, with the ongoing fragmentation of the nuclear family… the obsession with the sexual abuse of children in public places reflects widespread moral panic about the breakdown of gendered and generational boundaries.” Ivy continues:
What is clear from the record is that such moral panic could not have occurred without the intense investment in the pristine innocence of the “child” in late twentieth-century America. Recovered memories or no, the insistence on a wholly pure, sexually innocent child—and the terror that the potential defilement of that purity provokes—remains at the very heart of the ritual abuse panic (as well as the adult recovered memory movement). What makes this insistence even more revealing is that it occurs under the immense sexualization of children within consumer capitalism: There is no more charged figure for the seductive and the seducible than the child. The effect of mass media and consumption on children’s sexuality seems rarely remarked in the analysis of abuse cases, and not surprisingly. For to think about the child as a sexual object in capitalism is already to have violated the pristine space that the child must occupy to guarantee the crumbling social order….
Freud, of course, taught us that children are sexual beings. And memories are narrative reconstructions, artful mixtures of event and fantasy. Put into language, they can be deceptive. But equally deceiving are the “rococo paranoia” and “socio-sexual fantasies” of parents, child support services personnel, therapists, law-enforcement officials, district attorneys, and doctors, who so easily imagine midnight masses, devil masks, and rape orgies:
And along with those fantasies, an even stranger and stronger one: that of the untouched child, pristine and unaffected by the capitalized sexuality all around her. It is Nathan and Snedeker’s book that powerfully unmasks this world of specifically American phantasms, in which the terrors of day-care abuse appear as fabulous, perverse displacements of the systematic—satanic?—societal abuse and neglect of millions of real kids.
In March 1996, unattended by any sort of fanfare, in an otherwise routine MOW on ABC called Forgotten Sins, network television came full circle after only six years. John Shea, who had starred as a tough cop convinced his son had been molested at a
preschool in the 1989 TV movie that started the whole prime-time craze for ritual abuse, Do You Know the Muffin Man?, also starred in Forgotten Sins, once again as a cop, who this time out was somehow persuaded that he himself had abused his own daughters, and so had half of his buddies on the force, all of them belonging to a satanic cult into goats and swords, dolls and pitchforks, Viking helmets and sacrificial infanticide. Shea was encouraged in this delusion, unto prison, by religious nuts, crazed prosecutors, bullying therapists, and, of course, the vampire media. But “sociologist” William Devane had bearded doubts. Bess Armstrong, playing Shea’s wife, only pretended to go along with the witch hunt so she could keep custody of her little boy. You wouldn’t have believed one of these accusers, Lisa Dean Ryan, if she told you she’d gone to the bathroom. And while the ABC movie had nothing to say about a psychology that insists on the sexual innocence of children, an economy that sexualizes them, our need for Satan now that Stalin’s gone, the perverse displacement of our fear of our own families onto surrogates like day care, or Little Red Riding Hood and the seduction theory, Forgotten Sins at least felt bad in all the right places.
Masks, mirrors, psychoanalysis, family values, consumer capitalism, the succubus media, and spectator sports… all show up on television because everything shows up on television because television can’t help itself. In both directions, sending or receiving, it’s always on: “The cat eats the bird; Picasso eats the cat; painting eats Picasso.” Before the lost child on American television, there was the lost child in American culture, from the captivity narratives of New England Puritans kidnapped by Indians to Huck Finn, Little Orphan Annie, and Holden Caulfield. (“Though I have done other things through the years,” we are told by the surprise parent in Anne Beattie’s Picturing Will, “I still think of myself as the person who knelt so many times to tie your shoelaces. Who needed to see them double-knotted and to know that you were safe, again, from tripping. I could have identified your feet, and still could, I see them so clearly, in a lineup of a hundred children.”) Before Freud, there was Kaspar Hauser, the Wolf Boy of Aveyron, and the punitive Brothers Grimm, (In Absence, Peter Handke remembers “how in childhood we had often hidden from others because we wanted them to look for us.” Kafka’s first novel, lost to us, alas, was called The Child and the City.) And previous to these Black Forests there was Goethe’s Gretchen, who drowned her newborn before killing herself, not to mention the slaughter of the innocents and the sacrifice of Isaac in the Bible, or the ritual infanticide of the mother cults of the ancient Middle East, or a classical literature full of dreadful fantasies of mothers losing or killing their children and of maidens dragged by their fathers to sacrificial altars, dying of despair at abandonment, stoned because they were raped; of Niobes, Medeas, Iphigenias, Ariadnes, and Didos. Don’t let’s get started on Claude Lévi-Strauss and his embroidery of the Amazonian Tucuna myth about the baby-snatching frog and the honey-gathering cycle. TV, like fairy tales and structuralism, is how we dream out loud about ourselves. Sitting down to watch, we are also projecting. In Possessing the Secret of Joy, her scary novel about female genital mutilation in Africa, Alice Walker took as her epigraph what she described as a “bumper sticker”: When the ax came into the forest, the trees said the handle is one of us.
When Studs Listens, Everyone Else Talks
STUDS TERKEL WAS eighty years old Monday night. So what Studs did was publish another book. Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession. And what some of the rest of us did was go to a party for him, which he wasn’t permitted to tape-record. He had to sit there, being admired, which is one of the few things he isn’t good at. If you stay put, you might miss the action. While we were admiring Studs, for instance, they abolished democracy in Peru.
About the party, I won’t tell you everybody there, they already know who they are. Many of them have been fighting losing causes since the Spanish Civil War. But mention must be made of two celebrants I’ve never seen before in almost a quarter-century of New York literary cocktail parties. One was Pete Seeger, in the kitchen, without his guitar. The other was Kenneth Clark, who started testifying to the pathologies of American apartheid as far back as 1952, in Clarendon, South Carolina, when the NAACP began its legal suit to desegregate our public schools.
(Time flies away. Back in 1953, it was Ike, not Ronald Reagan, who had this to say about the American South to his new chief justice, Earl Warren: “These aren’t bad people. All they’re concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes.”)
Clark, who must have had another party to go to, wore black tie. Seeger, of course, did not. Studs was his usual vision of red checkerboard. The rest of us lacked such dash.
Imagine Studs in action on the Chicago streets, on foot because he can’t drive, in a raincoat and battered hat, with a hearing aid and a tape recorder, bluffing his way into the Ida B. Wells housing project on the black South Side, sitting down in somebody’s kitchen, talking about race.
America’s premier oral historian is also one of the last of the integrationists—a throwback to Martin Luther King; and before Dr. King, to the left wing of the CIO; and before that, to Jewish socialism and the French Revolution. He’s kept the faith by continuing to test it. He will talk to anybody, and he listens twice, first right there in the kitchen, and then again when he edits the tapes for his books, where intelligence is made somehow musical, where conversations become cantatas. I’m tempted then to call him an oratorio historian. This is what Walt Whitman must have meant when he said he heard America singing.
Not all the songs in Race are cheerful. Everybody, white, black, brown, and yellow, seems to agree that relations between the races are worse than they’ve ever been, worse than they were in the sixties riots. Most blame the go-go greedhead Reagan years and the drug epidemic. Farrakhan gets mentioned more often than I’d have thought imaginable or desirable. As if in counterpoint to Farrakhan, there’s also a lot of country blues singer Big Bill Broonzy.
But nobody Studs talks to has given up. (Certainly not Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Mobley, who became a teacher after her son was murdered.) They have all got jobs to find, and children to raise, and neighborhoods to save, and a nation to recover from its waste of scruple, its conscience gone up in smoke like Puff the Magic Dragon.
Where does he find these people? Mostly, but not always, in Chicago. Some, but not most, he’s talked to before. Male or female, without exception, it’s their working lives that give them their perspective. They are paramedics, firefighters, and flight attendants; carpenters and computer software salesmen; steelworkers, musicians, hairdressers, medical students, hospital aides, and chauffeurs; union reps, evangelists, black separatists, and Ku Klux Klanners; ex-Communists, ex-priests, retired domestics, and many, many teachers, most of them despairing.
Each new Terkel book I make a big deal about this amazing democracy of occupations. Why? Because the brain, too, is a muscle and it’s nice—it’s more than nice, it’s thrilling—to see it exercised by people who have never shown up on Face the Nation or Ted Koppel, where all we hear from are the male and pale with their credentialed technoblab of “underclass” and “trickle-down”: the mellowspeak salesmen in their Beltway blisterpacks, pushing a capital gains tax cut as the pep pill/miracle cure for moral fatigue, social paralysis, and economic catastrophe.
Disappointed, hesitant, or driven as they may be, there’s no doubt at all that America would be a better place if everybody listened to these working people, not just radical-humanist Studs Terkel, that passionate old man with the brave songs and the magic hearing aid.
Amazing Grace
THIS WAS AWHILE ago, on Second Avenue across the street from the Israeli Consulate, right next door to National Public Radio. From the window of a bus, I saw they were demonstrating—something about the intifada. So I got out and walked around and met the New Jewish Agenda and there, of course, was Grace Paley. I wante
d to tell her to go home and write another story. I would agitate in her stead. For decades, no matter where, every time I went to a demonstration, she was already there. I also knew that when I didn’t show up, she’d be there, anyway. Why not a bargain? Couldn’t she call when she felt a demonstration coming on? I’d go for her. She’d stay home and invent another report for her friends and her children on “the condition of our lifelong attachments.” I had nothing better to do with myself than a Grace Paley short story.
“Then, as often happens in stories, it was several years later.” And here we are, in this lovely building that’s not the least bit like the old Greenwich Village Women’s House of Detention where, after sitting down to impede some military parade, she spent six days reading William Carlos Williams, after which she wrote that if there must be prisons, “they ought to be in the neighborhood, near a subway—not way out in distant suburbs, where families have to take cars, buses, ferries, trains, and the population that considers itself innocent forgets, denies, chooses to never know that there is a whole huge country of the bad and the unlucky and the self-hurters, a country with a population greater than that of many nations in our world.”