THE BELL CURVE -- joseph n. bell

My family goes to a lot of movies, and although our style was cramped

over the holidays by illness, we still managed to see more than a dozen.

Don’t cringe. I’m not going to list the five best or the five worst. But

I would like to single out one that engaged me greatly and that you might

possibly miss simply because of a misleading title.

It’s called “Cradle Will Rock,” and it’s not about a nanny stealing a

baby or the birth of Elvis Presley. It’s about the Great Depression and

politically incorrect ideas and how the artists who expressed them were

treated.

The title is the name of a musical being rehearsed in the mid-1930s for

production by the Federal Theater Project. The FTP was created by the

Roosevelt administration to keep artists at work during the Depression on

the conviction, once held firmly in this country, that their contribution

is critical enough to an open society to merit substantial government

support. It has special significance here because we keep electing a

congressman whose major goal as a public servant appears to be denying

such support to the arts.

“Cradle Will Rock” dramatized the workers’ right to strike at a time when

strikebreakers and goons were being hired to prevent the growth of

corporate unions, a period in American history that is seldom taught in

our schools.

The movie reached me on two levels. First, it caught the dehumanizing

despair of the Depression with graphic accuracy as I remember it. I can

still see those endless lines for everything, but especially for work --

any kind of work. And, second, it also caught the power of ideas to so

threaten people that they would rather expunge than examine them.

In a kind of preamble to the McCarthy hearings almost 20 years later,

Hallie Flanagan -- who headed the FTP -- was called before a committee of

congressional reactionaries who found her ideas so disturbing they not

only forced the government to shut down “Cradle Will Rock,” but attacked

her personally. The movie tells how the theater people -- led by Orson

Welles and John Houseman -- pulled it off anyway.

All of this came at a time when I was puzzling over how to deal -- if at

all -- with personal attacks in the letters column of the Pilot from

people who disagree with my ideas, but know nothing of me personally. My

policy with angry letter-writers has always been to let the critics have

their say and move on. I’ve never had any illusions about the fact that

some of my social and political views are far from the norm in Orange

County.

But there is a line. And I think Steve Smith caught it pretty well on

Christmas Day, when he took umbrage with critics of his column about the

school board’s failure to promote Wendy Leece.

He made two points in particular bearing on my situation: that his

critics got on him for topics he never mentioned in his column, and then

chose to divert attention from the message by unleashing a personal

attack on the messenger.

That pretty well describes two recent letters in the Pilot excoriating a

column of mine in which I took issue with our local congressmen for

trotting out all the old Cold War rhetoric about Communists in dealing

with China.

Douglas Toohey made a legitimate argument against my position, but then

felt required to explain that wasn’t what I was up to at all. I was, he

said, “typical of the academic lightweights who see nothing in political

and foreign policy questions but opportunities to enhance their inflated

self-importance, their sense of superiority over the lowly bourgeois

citizenry that their mediocre educations have taught them to despise.”

Then a letter-writer named Tom Williams anointed me as the world champion

Bill Clinton “behind-kisser.” Although I mentioned Clinton only once, in

a quote from Chris Cox (and Williams has no idea how I feel about the

president or evidence to support his thesis), he is quite certain that my

real motive in writing the column was to “cover Clinton’s behind.”

There is more in the same vein, but you get the idea.

I could say a good deal in rebuttal to the factual arguments in both

letters. Williams’ principal quoted source for his information, for

example, was the right-wing Washington Times, which probably hasn’t

reported that a Stanford University Center for International Security

study has concluded that the Cox committee report was riddled with

factual errors, its language “inflammatory” and its key conclusions

“unwarranted.” Or that the FBI has found no credible evidence that the

alleged Los Alamos spy, Wen Ho Lee, committed espionage, and he has been

indicted, instead, for improperly downloading classified files.

But that’s not the point today. We’re talking here about attacking the

messenger instead of the message. I’ll defend my positions, when

necessary, and I’ve even been known to change my mind. But I don’t know

Toohey and Williams, and they don’t know me, and even if we did know one

another, that should have no bearing on the ideas being challenged.

I suppose a bachelor’s degree from the University of Missouri could be

considered a “mediocre education,” but teaching for 20 years in the UCI

English department of PhDs was a lot more conducive to humility than

self-importance.

I only hope that the ideas I offer up here will stimulate the kind of

healthy debate that makes attacking the messenger not only irrelevant,

but foolish.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a Santa Ana Heights resident. His column runs

Thursdays.