Culture Watch: Action Jackson - Brief Article

National Review, Feb 19, 2001

Redemption works fast these days. In the interval between NR's last issue and this, Jesse Jackson has fallen, risen, and gone back to work. A few aspects of the quickest story ever told should be remembered.

Jackson and his mistress, Karin Stanford, did one important thing right, by saving the life of their child. Jackson has been pro-abortion ever since he first ran for president in 1984. But before that, he had called abortion "murder." He had reason to do so, since his own mother, a teenager who became pregnant by a married neighbor, considered aborting him until a minister talked her out of it. How many of Jackson's fellows (millions of them black) have gone to the pyre of Moloch with his acquiescence? But when the choice came to him and his lover, they chose life. He is, it turns out, truly "personally opposed."

Miss Stanford's life could be a modern Rake's Progress. Before going to work for PUSH, she had a job teaching political science and black studies in Georgia. The scholarly work that first caught Jackson's eye was a book she had written on his effect on foreign policy-truly a weighty subject. What more fitting reward for the affirmative-action track than the attentions of a race hustler?

The public has no right to know everything about public figures. Libel laws once recognized "the peace of families" as an untouchable area, even when the families belonged to politicians and other celebrities. If hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, it is also a real tribute. But when damaging truths come out, consequences should follow. Jackson's rubber-ball rebound reflects a larger pathology in American religion. It used to be a bit of Protestant folk wisdom that the confessional allowed Catholics to purge themselves cheaply and sin again. This view reflected, not only bigotry and ignorance, but a determination to preserve one's moral uprightness. These days, emotional Protestantism, black and white, has made its own version of the once-dreaded confessional: the public confession. The sinner squirts a few tears, the congregation shouts a few "Hallelujahs," and everyone is back in business. Oprah is simply a secularized version of this cheap rite.

The question that seems custom-made for the modern media's eye is, of course, where did the money come from? Miss Stanford got a generous severance package, lives in a posh West Coast house, and gets monthly child-support payments. Jackson has been sloshing in money, siphoned from the large white businesses he intimidates and the small black businesses he chooses to cut in, for years. Where does it come from? Where does it go? The press can hunt these facts down when it chooses; the Washington Post took a bloodhound's interest in the finances of the Christian Coalition. Race and ideology, however, will surely delay Jackson's day of reckoning.

Jackson had an undoubted vein of eloquence, and in his first year or so on the national stage he showed a freedom from reflexive liberal postures and remedies, even if that freedom sometimes led him to the side of Fidel Castro, or Louis Farrakhan. That spark of promise long ago went out. His rhetoric has been eroded by repetition; all that is left is parody. Maybe his children will redeem his lineage; he can no longer redeem himself.