Black thought, black talk

BLACK THOUGHT, BLACK TALK

LISTEN CAREFULLY, Ibeg you, to these two or three sentences written by an English teacher (C. Webster Wheelock) in Manhattan and published as a part of an essay in the New York Times on "Our Incredible Shrinking Language.' They teach more than most of the rhetoricians you will hear from now to the end of the year.

"I recently sat through,' the teacher begins,"a graduation ceremony in which one of the apeakers used the adjective "incredible' four times and its synonym "unbelievable' once. . . . Why did he appear to suggest by his choice of language that the accomplishments in question went beyond the laudable to the improbable? . . . And why did all of us listening to him easily and automatically discount the value of the expressions he had selected? . . . The answer lies in the steady erosion of power in an important part of our language over recent decades.'

The English teacher is concerned overimplausible raves. They are the treacly counterpart of their opposite, which are implausible negatives; except that these do more damage because they are based on bile. What Senator Edward Kennedy said about the nomination of Robert Bork as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court should drum him out of the councils of civilized men engaged in democratic exchange. It will take more than just one book by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to clean up this act.

"Robert Bork's America,' said SenatorKennedy, quoted in large type in the issue of the New York Times published the day before the lesson from the English teacher, "is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids . . .'

Now either Senator Kennedy was drunkwhen he uttered these lines, in which case he should not drink before he drives or orates; or else he has proved as irresponsible as any demagogue in the recent history of the United States. It is hard to imagine anyone in this century--Bilbo, Smith, McCarthy, Coughlin--coming up with charges so withered in distortion and malice.

Consider the question of abortion. IfBork voted to reverse Roe v. Wade, he would need four other judges whose consciences instructed them that it was a bad constitutional decision. Does it then follow that women would be forced into back-alley abortions? Only if the solid majority of the American people went on to urge their legislatures to write anti-abortion laws. Kennedy knows as well as Planned Parenthood Inc. that that would not happen. To withdraw the license of Roe v. Wade is not to illegalize abortion.

And why would blacks sit at segregatedlunch counters? Where has Robert Bork defended Jim Crow? He was always opposed to state laws enforcing racial segregation, which is different from upholding the right of the state to prescribe conduct; though even on this point, the libertarian Bork is at one these days with the overwhelming majority of the voters, who would kick out of office anyone suggesting any return even to Jim Crow privately administered at one's own hot-dog stand.

What has Bork said that would giveto rogue police the right to break down citizens' doors in midnight raids? And while we are at it, when police do break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, what is there inherently to convince us that they are rogue police? Might they be answering a woman's cry against a rapist or a murderer? And what other four Supreme Court Justices, and which of the fifty state legislatures, are going to start a campaign to give license to rogue police?

But this is heady business, this victimologyby which some irresponsible men and women prosper. Benjamin Hooks, the head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who fancies himself engaged in the promotion of toleration in America, proclaims that Bork "would in effect wipe out all of our gains of the past thirty years.'

That would be an extraordinary commission.Somebody should inform Teddy Kennedy and Ben Hooks that Bork is not being nominated dictator of a brandnew country; that not one Supreme Court decision has overthrown any single one of the one hundred decisions Bork has written in his five years as federal judge; and that if, in their nightmare, he was nominated and approved as dictator, Robert Bork would not wish to transform the face of America in the image of Hieronymus Bosch. The voters should be reminded that such as Kennedy and Hooks are heavily engaged in attempting to transform a land of civil and vigorous discourse into a republic of slander. And that slander, which includes the abdication of reason and conscience, is, as Orwell taught, the road to totalitarianism. Kennedy's vituperation of Bork is of a class with Goebbels's vituperation of the Jews.

COPYRIGHT 1987 National Review, Inc.
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