I`ve got to stop eating red meat and reading The New York Times. Both clog the arteries.
For example, consider my first, vague reaction to the news that George Bush had nominated Clarence Thomas to succeed Thurgood Marshall on the U.S. Supreme Court. Aha! The president had found an equal but opposite Thurgood Marshall-a right-wing ideologue of no particular intellectual distinction to succeed a left-wing one. Would the new justice now proceed to undo whatever the old one had done-good, bad and indifferent? Justice Marshall would be to a Justice Thomas as thesis to antithesis. Neat. Simple.
Too neat, too simple. The nominee hadn`t even said Word One and already I had him pigeonholed, if not very consciously. Definitely a case of hardening of the images. Call it sclerosis of the mind.
Where do I get these ideas?
Maybe The New York Times. Listen to this opening salvo in the guise of a news analysis by Linda Greenhouse on the front page of the Times:
”WASHINGTON, July 1-Clarence Thomas, who at age 43 is barely half the age of the man whose Supreme Court seat he was named today to fill, came of age in the world that Thurgood Marshall helped create. Now the question is to what extent, if he is confirmed, Judge Thomas would add weight to the court`s new majority that appears willing, even eager, to dismantle important parts of the legacy that Justice Marshall helped to build.”
There you have Clarence Thomas as seen through the media mist: an ungrateful wretch about to undo the brave new world that nurtured him. This may be a free translation from the Timesese, but the animus of this
”analysis” is unmistakable. Linda Greenhouse`s opening paragraphs may not say much about Clarence Thomas`s political predilections, but they say an awful lot about hers. Nor are such views confined to the once good gray Times. Yet anyone who reads the text of Clarence Thomas`s speech to the Heritage Foundation back in June of 1987 will have trouble thinking of him as anybody`s man but his own. He sure ain`t nobody`s boy. Nor is he soft on racial discrimination. (”I grew up under state-enforced segregation, which is as close to totalitarianism as I would like to get.”) It may be precisely because Clarence Thomas is a product of a racially segregated society that he is so suspicious of race-based remedies.
The tone of this speech was anything but accepting of injustice. On the contrary, it was angry and offended. His words were a lot clearer than the mushy mediocrity that characterizes so many Supreme Court (non)decisions today. In this speech, he pointedly criticized the Reagan administration for supporting a tax exemption for seggish Bob Jones University, and for not getting out in front ”early and positively” in favor of a decent Voting Rights Act. He was as hard, maybe harder, on conservatives for snubbing blacks as on liberals for trying to co-opt black causes. (”It often seemed that to be accepted within the conservative ranks and to be treated with some degree of acceptance, a black was required to become a caricature of sorts, providing side shows of anti-black quips and attacks.”)
Just who this Clarence Thomas is should be clearer after the hearings on his nomination-he`s an outspoken type-but it should already be obvious that he`s no Stepin Fetchit. Nor is he some privileged character who was raised in a world of equal opportunity and is now out to destroy it. He is not likely to prove a Stealth nominee a la David Souter or a tangle of Borkian knots. Judge Thomas is more likely to speak of Natural Law rather than spout a lot of quasi-scholarship about Original Intent.
Even those who do not find Clarence Thomas sympathetic may find him understandable, which would be progress in a nominee for the Supreme Court of the United States. The peroration of his address before the Heritage Foundation-in which he invoked Lincoln, John Quincy Adams, Martin Luther King Jr. and Thomas Aquinas among others-was a wow. And nobody should have trouble discerning the spirit of the Declaration of Independence in his informed and coherent conclusion:
Natural law, he argued, ”allows us to reassert the primacy of the individual, and establishes our inherent equality as a God-given right. This inherent equality is the basis for aggressive enforcement of the civil rights laws and equal employment opportunity laws designed to protect individual rights. Indeed, defending the individual under these laws should be the hallmark of conservatism rather than its Achilles` Heel.”
Yet none of this has kept the more myopic mediacrats from seeing-and depicting-Clarence Thomas as some kind of clear and present danger to Americans` equality under law. Just listen to these collected hysterics from columnist Carl Rowan: ”It horrifies me that the country might have to endure 40 years of opinions of a black man who has shown no sense of compassion for the needs of the poor, who hasn`t the guts to acknowledge that `self-help`
isn`t enough in a milieu of institutionalized racism, and who embraces heartless legalisms where the abortion and other rights of women are at issue.” And that`s just the start of his diatribe.
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Come on, Mr. Rowan, give the man a break. Give the rest of us a break. Give America a break. So overdrawn a caricature hasn`t been seriously disseminated since the heyday of the minstrel show. It is all the more impressive for having been penned before the nominee had a chance to answer a single question at his confirmation hearings. However deep the inroads of institutionalized racism in this country, that bane may not be as firmly entrenched as institutionalized idiocy in our national mediacracy. And nothing seems to set it off like the sight of a black conservative coming into his own. There is a name for this kind of thing: Prejudice.