Stuck with Labels

By Thomas Griffith

Newswatch

Everyone admits the injustice, the oversimplification of labels, but the press sticks them on anything and everything nonetheless. When it doesn't invent a label itself, the press gratefully seizes on someone else's catch phrase. That's how Ronald Reagan early captured the high ground on his budget cutting. He promised not to harm the "truly needy" and to provide a "safety net" for protected groups like the aged. These soothingly imprecise phrases, so often repeated by Republican orators and in the columns, have set the tone of the budget debate.

As the Administration settles in and its top people become more familiar, labels are also being stuck to them. Cartoonist Herblock has at last found in Secretary of State Haig a fiendish target for caricaturing that he hasn't enjoyed since the days of Nixon's sinister 5 o'clock shadow. Herblock's Haig is an overepauleted, Napoleonic Dr. Strangelove. Not all the press's labels have been so unfriendly, at least at the outset. Reagan's budget-cutting David Stockman is often referred to as "the brilliant 34-year-old conservative," but as Russell Baker noted in a fine, wry column, "Whom the media would destroy they first make young and brilliant." This happens, Baker suggests, less from cunning than from an occupational instinct for building melodrama. Just wait, Baker predicts: an audience that is mostly neither young nor brilliant will be "easily amused at seeing whippersnappers get their comeuppance."

In its earlier, more impish days, TIME, inspired by Homer's "wine-dark sea," fastened labels on everything in sight and endlessly repeated them. New York's mayor was always "fireplug-shaped Fiorello La Guardia"; the city's newspaper, in a phrase that combined admiration with gentle sarcasm, was "the good gray New York Times." So familiar was this practice that Johnny Mercer parodied it in a Broadway show tune, Affable, Balding Me. TIME'S double-barreled labels came to a quiet end when a later managing editor, T.S. Matthews, forbade the use of them unless a writer could improve upon Carlyle's description of Robespierre as "the seagreen Incorruptible."

Labels are a handy and necessary form of compression. How else does a reader remember whether it is Ethiopia or Somalia that is under Soviet and Cuban domination? But labels can mislead. In his new autobiographical Ways of Escape, Graham Greene writes: "I had an idea before I went to Malaya, an idea picked up from an unsympathetic press, of a group of men, the harsh overseers of great capitalist enterprises, intransigent, unconstructive exploiters of native labor, drinking stengah after stengah in the local club, probably in the Somerset Maugham manner making love to each other's wives. But before I had stayed long in Malaya I learned that there was no such thing as 'the planter'--there was only X or Y." But did such false preconceptions in a fiction writer's mind come from "an unsympathetic press" or from novels he had read? Greene himself has proved to be a master at creating such stereotypes, including that dangerously gullible innocent loose in Asia, The Quiet American.

Labels generally lack subtlety. A button that says RIGHT TO LIFE or RIGHT TO CHOOSE leaves little space for reservations. Yet some labels that were pejoratives have come in time to be worn proudly by the accused. Originally, Tory meant an Irish thief; gothic, now used to describe great cathedrals, was once a dismissing word for something wild and crude. In the great political transformation that has taken place since Roosevelt's day, politicians who once flaunted their liberalism have come to prefer softer labels such as progressive, moderate, pragmatic--or have sought to have it both ways as in "conservative in fiscal matters, liberal on the social issues." Similarly, many politicians who wear the newly fashionable label conservative like to distance themselves from right-wing, which still carries an uncompromising, or uncaring, sound.

It used to be said that those who wrote the nation's songs were somehow more influential than those who wrote its laws, though since Bob Dylan there hasn't been much proof of this. Perhaps power now goes to those who affix the country's labels. Editors and others who do so should recall Albert Einstein's dictum that everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler.

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