The Misanthrope's Corner

National Review, Dec 8, 1997 by Florence King

Miss King is the author of The Florence King Reader and other books.

BRACE yourselves, this is an upbeat column. The Virginia gubernatorial election and the reaction to the verdict in the "Au Pair Murder Trial" put a song in my heart.

As you know, our new Republican governor-elect, James S. Gilmore III, won a thunderous victory with a single issue: his promise to abolish the "car tax," an annual levy based on the assessed value of cars and trucks.

I doubt Gilmore can do it, but that's not the point. What has my toes curling is the dud Bill Clinton fired when, campaigning for the Democrat candidate, he warned that school budgets would suffer without the car-tax money: "This really is a question about whether Virginians will be selfish in the moment or selfless for their children and the future."

Weepy, the eighth dwarf, made a boo-boo. Instead of generating guilt he infuriated people. Letters columns filled up with vituperative rejoinders ("How dare he?") and talk radio turned into one big sputter of rage. For once, no one melted at the sacred word "children."

The same week, the second-degree murder conviction of au pair Louise Woodward triggered a spontaneous outpouring of support for her, along with demands that the verdict be dismissed and her sentence reduced to time served. As I write, the judge has not yet ruled on the requests, but again, that's not the point. What energizes me here is the spectacle of child-worshiping Americans rallying behind an English girl accused of infanticide. YESSS!

I see a light at the end of our tunnel vision. Americans are beginning to understand that adults count, too.

How they lost sight of this fact in the first place is not hard to fathom. A glance through my files makes it abundantly clear.

Headlines: STARVATION IN N. KOREA; REPORTS OF CHILDREN DYING.

Mary McGrory on Waco: "Nobody except their families would much care about the fiery deaths of the cultists if it weren't for the children."

Firefighter Randy Woods of the Oklahoma bombing: "Grown-ups, you know, they deserve a lot of the stuff they get. But why the children? What did the children ever do to anybody?"

It so happens that children are the source of the blanket of fear that now hangs over the head of every American adult.

Ann Landers on child sexual abuse: "I urge all who have a strong suspicion to act on it. You will have performed a humanitarian service."

The ubiquitous public-service announcement: "Concerned persons can report abuse anonymously. If they give their names, confidentiality is guaranteed by law."

The abuse witchhunt has given children power over adults to a degree never before seen in any society. False accusations are always blamed on overzealous social workers or prosecutors who supposedly planted the idea in the children's minds and coached them through their stories, but to believe that this is always the case is to spurn what W. C. Fields and I have worked so hard to establish.

The Sinless Child ranks with the Noble Savage as a repository of cracked idealism. Unable to think in the intellectual sense, children twitch and flicker in response to the stimuli of the moment like nocturnal creatures on the Discovery Channel, sensing with unerring instinct the perfect moment to strike.

They have a knack for locating adults' soft spots and a sense of timing that can set up an embarrassing moment to the millisecond. The evident nervousness parents exhibit when they bring adult strangers home suggests that the words "Oh, you mustn't say that!" have been spoken before, probably not for the last time. It is a known fact, always denied, that handicapped people, people with scars, homely people, and bald men don't like to be around children because the little fartlings have a mean streak wide enough to drive a truck through.

Since child abuse became the bee in every bonnet, children have caught on to its usefulness as the fork in every tongue. Taught in "awareness" lectures how to report anyone who so much as looks at them crooked, they know they have adults in the palms of their grubby little hands.

Adults also know it, which is why they are nervous wrecks. Teachers, camp counselors, day-care workers, sports coaches to whom the pat on the backside is second nature are all scared to death. So even are kindly souls who actually love children and enjoy making friends with them, like the editor of my local paper whose column about a misinterpreted action concluded: "It is sad that I, as well as other men I know, have stopped smiling at children in supermarkets."

Others have stopped frowning and yelling. The curmudgeonly retirees who used to chase children away from their flower beds and demand that the paper boy hit the porch now don't dare open their mouths, knowing that where revenge once was limited to overturned ashcans, it might now be a charge of child abuse.

WHAT we fear, we hate. I don't claim that Americans have risen to my level of child-hatred -- many are called, few are chosen -- but signs indicate that they are fed up enough to admit that all it takes is one child to raze a village.