Family Values

By LANCE MORROW

There is a road that runs from the land of the Ik to the dog track in Idaho.

The Ik were the mountain people the anthropologist Colin Turnbull found in northern Uganda some years ago. They were going hungry and mistreating one another in horrible ways.

The Ik were as hideous as family values can get. Adults would sit around the $ fire and think it was uproarious when a baby toddled toward the flames. Children would excavate food from the mouths of weakened grandparents and run away laughing. A wife would die by the roadside, and her husband would walk on without looking back, relieved to be rid of the burden.

The anxiety behind the phrase "family values" may derive from an intimation of such breakdown, a flicker of the instant when the moral slippery slope may swivel like a trapdoor to right angles. Americans see the inner Ik all the time these days. They glimpsed it out of the corner of the eye for a moment when an 82-year-old man with Alzheimer's disease was abandoned at the dog track in Post Falls, Idaho, last March. A cautionary scene -- and it turned into a morning talk-show joke: "It's dog-track time for you, doofus!" the host with hyena cackle, whooping and snorting, tells someone. The sense of the Ik within American society, an uncaring, a messy, stupid license gone out of control, gives some plausibility to Republican rhetoric on the subject.

Some people detected a heavy dose last week in the tabloid drama involving Woody Allen and Mia Farrow's adopted daughter.

Anyway, the motif of family values kept recurring along the Ik-Idaho Road. The Republicans conjured it up and turned it to powerful political effect. Their show in Houston was gaudy and complex -- a hellfire tent meeting dissolving to a '50s television sitcom with flags and confetti and sometimes tinny modulations.

The family-values part of the Republican production was, as they kept saying of Bill Clinton, relentlessly slick. It depended on a sort of grieving, part- nostalgic assumption that Americans live amid unwholesome aliens (homosexual teachers who want to proselytize, condom distributors, abortion-mongers, she-devil lawyers named Hillary) in a postlapsarian age, after some immense moral fall (whenever or whatever that may have been), something that has gone hugely wrong in American life.

It is far from a new theme in U.S. history. In 1971 a young White House speechwriter, Patrick J. Buchanan, wrote a memo to President Richard Nixon suggesting that the theme be used as a weapon. His campaign strategy: cut the country and Democratic Party in half, and pick off "far the larger half." The Republicans told America that George McGovern meant "acid, abortion and amnesty." Nixon's "half" in the 1972 election was a landslide.

Now, 21 years later, Pat Buchanan rose before the delegates in Houston to declare what he called "a cultural war" (nothing like a war to obscure the economic issue) and try to help tear off a fat half of America for George Bush. A '50s kind of week in several ways: Buchanan eerily reproduced the punitive, menacing quality of his boyhood hero, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin. The role of threat to the American essence used to be played by communism. But moral squalor at home would do as well. Buchanan pounded at "the agenda that Clinton & Clinton ((meaning Bill and Hillary)) would impose on America -- abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units . . ."

Buchanan glared like a Jesuit prefect of discipline and stabbed the air. His rendition was family values in the bully's mode -- an appeal to visceral prejudices, not to American ideals. Barbara Bush and the tableau of Bush children and grandchildren transmitted a softer version, a kind of Pepperidge Farm, white-bread appeal in handsome plenty.

To approach the family-values question, it may be necessary to remember the formula of F. Scott Fitzgerald: he said the sign of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to retain two mutually contradictory ideas in the mind at the same time and still be able to function. The two mutually contradictory but simultaneously valid ideas involved here are these:

1) The issue of family values is the last refuge of a scoundrel -- or of a threatened Republican incumbent. The issue is almost by definition a smokescreen, and a manipulation of voters' closeted fears and prejudices. The Republicans are wary about emphasizing race this year. They are sensitive about criticism of the way they used Willie Horton in 1988. And they have been making progress in attracting black middle-class supporters. So they have switched their emphasis to family values with a sexual subtext -- Murphy Brown, out-of-the-closet gay militance, condom distribution in the schools, sexual flamboyance in publicly funded art projects, and so on. Dan Quayle and others working the values circuit like to encourage the feeling that the American id is dangerously seeping up through the floorboards: Clamp down the superego.

Further, family values, a flashy issue of opportunity, has about it a certain eloquent irrelevance -- something like the old waving of the bloody shirt, or the snake-oil vending that has always gone on in American politics. North Carolina Senator Robert Rice Reynolds, a baroque declaimer of the Southern school of rural demagogy in the '30s and '40s, was a genius of flavorsome insinuation. "Do y'all know what ((my opponent's)) favorite dish is?" he would ask slowly of his "God-fearin', 'tater-raisin', baby-havin' " constituents. Then in a burst of disgusted indignation: "Caviar!" The word came out caw-vee-yah. "You know what caviar is? It's little black fish eggs, and it comes from Red Russia!" A certain amount of family-values rhetoric is mere caviar denunciation.

Another suspect side of family-values mongering: Why are so many conservatives, champions of individual freedom, so hell-bent on coercing people to march in lockstep? Why does the authoritarian impulse win out over the libertarian?

And yet:

2) The subject on another level is profoundly relevant. It addresses cultural divides in American life that must be sorted out if the nation is to proceed coherently. Although raised by opportunists seeking votes, the issue of family values goes to the soul of what kind of country Americans want and what kind of lives they live. The issue in this campaign represents more than mere partisan struggle. It is part of the nation's effort to assimilate -- in the deepest sense, to domesticate, to understand, to control -- changes in American society over the past two generations: to deal with the consequences of sexual revolution, of women's liberation, of huge multicultural immigration from non-European sources, with the devastation caused by the drug trade, with the loss of America's long absolute postwar pre-eminence, with the fragmentation of the family. It is even a reflection of the baby boom generation's coming of age, having families and changing their moral perspective from individual self-gratification to a somewhat sobered emphasis on family.

In other words, it is not enough to dismiss the family-values issue as a political ploy in a tough Republican year.

A question is whether George Bush, or Dan Quayle, or Pat Buchanan, or any politician or government, can have much to do with improving a society's values -- family or otherwise. Surely the values, if worth anything, must be more deeply embedded in the culture than the slogans of transient politicians. A Memphis construction company owner named J.D. Walker Jr. watched the Republican Convention last week and said in some disgust: "We want President Bush to know the American citizenry is not dumb. Don't keep telling us things will get better if we let you dictate how to run our personal lives. In my list of important things about this campaign, family values is fourth. Just ahead of that at No. 3 is counting all the sand on all the beaches in the world. Get the idea?"

A second question is why family values would be any different or any better under a Bush Administration than under a Clinton Administration. And third, if government or politics can make American family values better, why have not the Republicans under nearly 12 years of Ronald Reagan and George Bush improved the moral tone of the country?

The family-values issue could conceivably become awkward for the Republicans this year: it invites questions about their responsibility and stewardship, and tempts a backlash. But do Americans accept the idea that Republican values are superior to those of Democrats? Perhaps. A TIME-CNN poll last week found that only 3% of voters consider family values to be the major issue in the campaign. More than one-third said the economy was the major issue, and 19% said unemployment. Only 1% believe abortion should be the main issue.

All this does not necessarily mean the Republicans are riding a weak horse. The fundamentalist family agenda has energy, even if the economy is the voters' first concern. Family-values questions play. In the poll, 71% agree that "there is something morally wrong with the country at this time." Almost as many agree with the idea that "television and other media . . . reflect a permissive and immoral set of values, which are bad for the country."

The gay issue has a strange prominence and civic complexity in this campaign. When he was interviewed two weeks ago by NBC's Stone Phillips, President Bush talked about homosexual marriage: " a life-style that in my view is not normal. I don't, I'm not, I don't favor that." The heterosexual public seems disposed to tolerate homosexuality but less inclined to grant gays civil rights protection. Nearly half of those polled consider it "very important that homosexuals be prevented from adopting children," and 67% answered no when asked, "Do you think marriages between homosexual men or between homosexual women should be recognized as legal by the law?"

"If we're talking about family values, we're talking about sticking by those we care for," responds Donald Suggs, a spokesman for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. "The way gay couples and their close friends have dealt with the AIDS epidemic is something that most so-called traditional families could learn a lot from."

Says Craig Dean, a Washington lawyer who has led the campaign for legal recognition of gay marriages: "We hold the same values of love, commitment, honesty and respect as heterosexual families do. ((The Republican position)) is an insult to millions of people in this country. They are saying, 'My family is better than yours.' "

Consider the case of Karen Grant of Goldsboro, North Carolina. She took her three sons, ages 13, 10 and 6, to the local library, and while she was helping the older boys find books, the six-year-old began browsing through a children's picture book called Daddy's Roommate, a book by Michael Willhoite written in the voice of a young boy whose parents divorce and whose father subsequently sets up housekeeping with his gay lover. The incident has created a storm and divided Goldsboro. The Grants call the book "antifamily" and claim among other things that it trivializes divorce and implicitly condones a homosexual life-style. What so upsets the Grants and others, including the editorial writer for Goldsboro's News-Argus, is that the mother in the book explains to her son, "Being gay is just one more kind of love and love is the best kind of happiness."

Says the father, Joseph Grant, an orthopedic surgeon: "This type of book is inappropriate in a public library. I don't want my tax dollars paying for it. This is all about character and developing that character and sense of family values in young children." He adds, "After all, 99% of parents across the country would not tell their five- or six-year-old child that it's O.K. to grow up and think it's a positive thing to get divorced, live a homosexual life-style, take drugs, whatever. The values that my wife and I hold are those of a majority of this community." But one Goldsboro woman responds, "Such arrogance! Some people don't want to believe that things like homosexuality and nasty divorces exist in a nice, quiet community like Goldsboro. They do." She tells the story of a couple who divorced some years ago. The pair had three sons. It turned out the father was a homosexual. One of the sons, a young man now, spoke before the library board after the Grants started their protest. "He said he wished he'd had access to a book like this when his family was going through that trauma," the woman says. "He said it would have helped him tremendously and would have told him it was O.K. to keep loving his daddy. There was nothing to help him understand the reality of what was happening." On Friday in Goldsboro, the library's board of trustees voted by a count of 7 to 2 to keep the book on its shelves.

What are family values?

The phrase sounds like the name of a discount center in the suburbs. In a sense, that is what it means -- the concept is an American warehouse of moral images, of inherited assumptions and brand-name ideals, of traditional wisdom, of pseudo memories of a golden age, of old class habits: here some of the culture's finest aspirations are on display, its handcrafted, polished virtues and a few handsome, valuable antiques. But also a lot of shoulder pads, Tic Tacs and mouthwash.

The term family values is inherently subjective. The use of the issue in this year's politics blends a yearning idealism with a breathtaking cynicism. On another level, that mix reflects the tendency of entertainment and politics -- and their values -- to merge confusingly with one another. The season's first episode of the television sitcom Murphy Brown next month will have Murphy's reply to the moral criticism leveled last spring by Vice President Dan Quayle -- continuing the argument over Murphy's single motherhood that showed Republican strategists just how powerful the family-values issue might be in this campaign. At an even farther remove from reality, the cartoon character Bart Simpson last week responded on television to President Bush's remark that he hoped the country's family values would be "a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons." Bart's response: "We're just like the Waltons. We're praying for the end of the Depression too."

Americans live in a culture of such bizarre electronic spin and reality- unreality interchange that even a yearning for the fictions of heartening Americana like The Waltons vanishes down a hall of mirrors.

It is a telling peculiarity of the family-values issue that it is so often framed in visual memories of television shows. Many Americans conjuring images of an earlier family ideal think of Ozzie and Harriet or Leave It to Beaver or The Donna Reed Show. They may even think that family values are something enacted in black and white -- the home returned to after school, the milk and cookies, a rustling of Mother in full stiff skirts. Americans almost never cite books as aide-memoire or illustrations of family values, perhaps because the TV sitcoms of American childhoods tended toward the sunny, whereas the novelists (think of John O'Hara, Philip Roth, John Cheever), if read at all, made their money by prying open American private lives and showing dirty secrets.

Republicans and Democrats often mean something quite different when they talk about family values.

The Republican meaning of family values tends to point toward a cultural ideal (two-parent heterosexual households, hard work, no pornography, a minimal tolerance of the aberrant). Says David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values: "Republicans really do want to argue about the culture. They want to argue about morality, what's right and wrong, standards of private behavior. They really do want to argue about sexuality, procreation and marriage."

Conservatives tend to say, Change the culture. Democrats tend to think of family values as matters that might be addressed by government policy -- which is precisely Dan Quayle's complaint. Conservatives uphold the private realm, Democrats the public realm. Conservatives tend to stress individual responsibility and changing behavior to correct the problem; liberals are inclined to think first of programs to mitigate the bad effects of trends such as unwed motherhood.

During the Democratic Convention, Bill Clinton and Al Gore staged a sort of pre-emptive celebration of family values, claiming the issue for themselves. How well they succeeded remains to be seen. They know the danger of Democrats' seeming promiscuously tolerant of all bizarreness in some aging '60s, Phil Donahue fashion. Clinton has often sounded virtually Republican in his insistence on personal responsibility.

"Bill Clinton accepts that there is a moral decline," says his campaign pollster, Stan Greenberg. "That the values of mainstream America have not been respected and supported. But George Bush is part of the problem." The Clinton strategy is summarized in the slogan that top strategist James Carville has posted in the campaign war room at the Little Rock, Arkansas, headquarters: "It's the economy, stupid." The Clinton approach, says Greenberg, is that "family values is about fifth on the list of what voters want addressed by their President."

Much Republican rhetoric posits a model of the family that is becoming rarer in reality. Almost all family values have to do with children, with how to make them happy and give them safe, decent lives. The real debate Americans should be having, says social historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, concerns "what all adults would give up to secure a childhood of innocence and freedom." Every expert and practically every citizen agree that children are better off being raised in a family with two parents. For various reasons, that is less and less the model of American child rearing.

Dan Quayle has a powerful point when he encourages individual responsibility and morality. His argument runs aground here and there on free-market paradoxes: the unfettered market is unerring, but the free market in television produces two gay men in bed together in prime time (thirtysomething back in 1989). Anthony Muir, a lawyer in Allentown, Pennsylvania, thinks the chief enemies of the family are television and consumerism: "The national drug policy says, Just Say No, and the beer commercials say, Say Yes to Alcohol, which is saying yes to drugs -- and the collateral kick is you can have sex too."

Often the targets and emphases of the Republicans' family-values campaigns seem a bit off. What worries parents most is a sense that they have little control over the world in which their children are growing up, over its temptations, its drugs, its overheated sex, its atmosphere of astonishing casual violence. Last week on the family-values dais in Houston, after Bush's acceptance speech, Arnold Schwarzenegger was a conspicuous honored guest. In the first few minutes of Terminator 2, parents do not fail to notice, Schwarzenegger, in order to steal someone's motorcycle and clothes, drives a long-bladed knife through a man's shoulder, pinning him to a pool table, and fries another man's hands and face on the griddle of a restaurant. Ten-year- olds watch Schwarzenegger's disgusting violence and absorb it as if it were normal, acceptable and heroic behavior.

Family values is a peculiar ingredient in this year's campaign. California pollster Mervin Field says, "The public has a limited amount of problem space in their heads . . . If you're at a rally and you're worried about losing your job, you don't care to hear about family values." But the historian Christopher Lasch remarks, "To see the modern world from the point of view of a parent is to see it in the worst possible light." The deeper energy in the values argument arises from that parent's perspective upon the future. It makes them angry. It makes them unpredictable voters.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: From a telephone poll of 1,250 American adults taken for TIME/CNN on Aug. 19-20 by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. Sampling error is plus or minus 3%

CAPTION: Which of the following are very important to promote family values?

Which candidate would do the best job promoting finally values?

(Asked of 958 registered voters)

Which position best represents your views about abortion?

Should school health clinics provide students with condoms?

Should laws that protect civil rights of racial or religious minorities be used to protect homosexuals?

With reporting by Tom Curry/New York, Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles and Lisa H. Towle/Raleigh