Caught between a Rocco and a hard place

JOSEPH N. BELL

In case you missed it, the mystery winner of a seat on the Orange

Unified School District board surfaced last week. In his first public

appearance since he filed candidate papers many months ago, Steve

Rocco in person underscored the election lesson he hopefully taught

all of us: Don’t vote in the dark. Or its corollary: When in doubt,

leave it blank.

Rocco told a Los Angeles Times reporter that he couldn’t think of

any educational issues he plans to address in his new role. But he

added that serving as a trustee would give him public visibility to

counter what he described as a conspiracy against him by a cabal of

public officials who have stalked and harassed him and his parents

for 25 years to force him to stop -- according to Rocco -- his

efforts to uncover corruption and scandal in local government. There

was more, much more of this sort of thing, all of it about as

relevant to the cause of public education as Rocco’s conspiracy.

The good citizens of Rocco’s school district who voted him into

office deserve what they got -- but the students are the ones who

will suffer. I don’t know who is more culpable, the people who voted

for Rocco because the teachers’ union supported his opponent or those

who bought into his flawed self-identity as a “teacher” or those who

just flipped a coin. Rocco finally got it right when he told The

Times reporter: “The only thing I did was run. I didn’t create this.”

AT THE MOVIES

My wife and I went to see “Kinsey” the other night and got a

postgraduate course in sex education. I was amused to be reminded

that Kinsey’s work came out of Indiana, the Old Red State that seemed

an unlikely place from which to launch a sexual revolution. When I

was growing up there, sex was not a topic of discussion in my family,

and hygiene was about as close as we came to it in school. So I got

my sex education from high school and college fraternity brothers and

four old guys I worked with summers loading castings on freight cars.

Also from truck drivers while hitchhiking and a film on venereal

disease I must have seen a half-dozen times during flight training

and which scared me more than the Japanese air force. Much of the

information I thus got was highly inaccurate but a lot more colorful

than the Kinsey approach.

The attitudes in that time and place toward sex were caught

graphically -- and essentially as I remember them -- in the film.

Misinformation and guilt characterized most of these attitudes, and

Kinsey was the first academic to spell that out for us. But the

clinical treatment of sex prevalent in the film went to the other

extreme and might well have profited by injecting a few fraternity

stories -- or a higher dosage of tenderness and love -- to lighten it

up. It is not coincidence that Kinsey’s downfall came when he tried

to explain female sexuality statistically. We men are simple

creatures easily reduced to numbers. Women aren’t.

GOLDEN BATTLE GIRLS

The lead segment on last Sunday’s “60 Minutes” shook me up. It was

about a bunch of senior citizens who had once, at some point in their

lives, been involved with a military reserve unit and thought they

had long since served their time. Not so, said the Pentagon, which is

clearly ready to scrape every manpower barrel to avoid the political

disaster that would accompany reactivating the military draft.

How deep are they ready to scrape? When I looked at some of these

people getting called up, I started to worry about my own

vulnerability. The centerpiece on “60 Minutes” was a 55-year-old

woman -- all 60 inches of her -- wearing battle fatigues and peering

down a gun barrel. I could probably take her at arm wrestling and

even beat some of the 40-something men looking acutely uncomfortable

in their fatigues and bewildered at this turn of events.

I’ve got a card somewhere that says I’m a member of the U.S. Navy

Reserve. I was told when I was given it after World War II that I had

no other option, so I had to sweat -- along with my wife and three

kids -- being called up during the Korean War. It happened to a lot

of my former comrades who had become weekend warriors in the active

reserve to keep their hand in flying and pick up a few bucks on the

side. There were also an alarming number of other pilots called up

who -- like me -- were in the Very Inactive Reserve, but I lucked

out. I thought I was home free for life after that, but so did those

lost souls I saw on “60 Minutes.”

Since the Pentagon seems to be closing in on my age group, I’m

checking out possible lines of escape. At the top of the list is the

Texas National Guard. I know I would be safe there. The downside is

that I’d have to move to Texas, but that’s probably better than Iraq.

BASKETBALL DIAPERIES

Normally, our neighborhood squabbles don’t get into the news. They

just get settled between the squabbling participants. But when the

participants make multimillions a year and have the eager ear of the

media, logic and reason get thrown out -- and a little grown-up

mediation seems in order.

I’m prepared to offer that to a pair of local neighbors who are

communicating their mutual hissies through reporters. Karl Malone and

Kobe Bryant live six blocks apart in a gated Newport Beach community.

I won’t try to go into the incomprehensible details of their dispute,

but it is keeping Malone from returning to the Lakers and sounds much

like similar quarrels I remember my kids bringing home from junior

high school.

So here’s what I suggest. One of you walk the six blocks to the

home of the other, offer him a beer and suggest sitting down and

talking it over. If it would help, I’ll be glad to carry the beers --

even if the Lakers don’t offer me travel money.

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

appears Thursdays.