Why is it that small matters often cloud the great issues that confront us, distorting perceptions and outcomes?
The question is raised by last week’s two big news events: the political nastiness over NAFTA and the marital blowup between John and Lorena Bobbitt.
Sure, they seem unrelated on the surface. But both illustrate a little-appreciated aspect of public discourse in America.
Every so often a small incident comes along that captures a deep-seated anxiety of the nation. And once our attention gets riveted on that one thing, however trivial, we lose sight of the big picture . . . and begin to act strangely.
In other times the Bobbitt episode would have rated no more than a two-line item at the bottom of the national briefs column. After all, it amounts to a tantrum between a couple of hotheaded young marrieds.
But the story broke just as millions of Americans are trying to sort through some very perplexing questions of gender, such as what constitutes sexual harassment, date rape and domestic violence. Mrs. Bobbitt and her kitchen knife cut to the core of the matter. She managed to capture the worst inner fears of homo Americanus, not only by slicing off her husband’s pride and joy, but by claiming justifiable revenge because of his alleged prior sexual transgressions.
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So instead of reflecting on last week’s important Supreme Court ruling on the definition of harassment, millions of us found ourselves guffawing at the Bobbitts. The really important issues, from wage discrimination to child support, got shoved aside by the more entertaining, if misleading, sideshow.
NAFTA is a much more substantial matter, but look what’s happening.
There is no way that free trade with Mexico will produce as many benefits-or disasters-as the zealots on both sides claim.
Many sober-minded analysts have come to agree with Paul Krugman, the MIT economist, that dropping our 4 percent (average) tarriff on goods imported from Mexico will have almost no impact on our overall balance of trade and even less on employment.
Companies that could boost profits by moving assembly lines to Mexico have done so already or will do so in the future, whether NAFTA flies or not. And while approval of the pact would allow us to export more goods into Mexico’s comparatively small market, we’d get a bigger kick from a good Christmas shopping season.
“Overall,” Krugman writes, “we will sell a few more mini-vans; Mexico will sell a few more tomatoes.”
But if you watched Vice President Al Gore go at it with Ross Perot the other night, you’d think the fate of our $5 trillion economy rides on the outcome of NAFTA.
What has happened, of course, is that NAFTA, like Mrs. Bobbitt’s knife, has become a lightning rod for pentup anxieties about more fundamental things.
Organized labor, which has been unable to hold the sympathies of the middle class, finally has found a winner. The public sees that blue-collar jobs are disappearing. It senses that wages have stalled and our standard of living has begun to slip.
So labor, by using a little sleight of hand, can point to the tar-paper shacks of Matamoros and Tijuana and say, “There’s your future under free trade.”
All this was good theater up to a point, and that point may have been reached last week. Suddenly Big Labor and Big Democrats are trading insults, raising the possibility that a marriage that has dominated American public life for 60 years may be about to break up over the political equivalent of burnt toast.
It’s unclear who crossed the line first, but the president complained of labor’s “muscle-bound” tactics, prompting an AFL-CIO official to shoot back, “Clinton has gone nuts.”
Locally, Chicago labor chief Robert Healey is trading insults with his heretofore ally, Mayor Richard Daley. Healey even dredged up the mayor’s “connections within connections” to Daley’s close friend and fundraiser, Paul Stepan, whose family runs a chemical plant in Mexico that allegedly pollutes and causes birth defects. Daley was livid at the cheap shot.
All this may blow over after this week’s NAFTA vote, but don’t count on it.
Clinton and Daley are likely to think twice before supporting the unions on upcoming issues such as a higher minimum wage.
It’s not easy to patch things up after the argument gets personal. Just ask the Bobbitts.