Learning by Heart

...Although he is good at dropping mordant comments ("Epidemiologists . . . showed up to educate and investigate...

...nfortunately, Kirp's keen observation hasn't stopped him from several attempts at his own brand of tidiness...

...that AIDS testing should be kept secret...

...He does so mostly to support sociological vacuities which he intermittently delivers with a dimwitted solemnity: "Students quickly learn that . . . the classroom is not an away-from-home family...

...Too bad...

...The people of Arcadia demurred...

...Some communities will respond warmly and supportively to children with AIDS...

...Kirp thus indulges a number of tics, the most annoying of which is an odd practice of citing, in erratic footnotes, a hodgepodge of titles from his professional library (e.g., Jules Henry's 1963 Culture Against Man, Dewey's 1927 The Public and Its Problems...

...that the political term "homophobia" has an identifiable referent...

...Of course, Learning by Heart is largely about human actions which, in Kirp's words, "go deeper than reason...

...that antiseptic prom-iscuity can be happily cherished as "safe sex," and so forth...

...Given this hideous event as a leitmotif for David L. Kirp and his five research collaborators,' Learning by Heart comes off as an admirably restrained collection of nine representative stories about schoolchildren with AIDS and about the different reactions of different communities across the nation, from 1985 until 1987...

...that homosexuality is not a pathology, nor even the symptom of a pathology...

...In some cases, like that of Ryan White in Kokomo, Indiana, the locals got ugly and became what Kirp calls a "community of exclusion...

...We are given to know that 'Steven Epstein, Marlene Strong Franks, Jonathan Simon, Douglas Conaway, and John Lewis...

...in fact, earlier versions of the Atascadero and Chicago stories appeared as feature articles in Sunday newspaper supplements, if you want some idea of the intended audience...

...Learning by Heart, a very absorbing and informative book, is also an evanescent book-of-the-hour...

...A more serious mode of dismissiveness, however, is tied up in Kirp's habit of asserting uncritically whatever he takes, on whatever grounds, to be correct and enlightened...

...Kirp's habit of regarding arguable matters as demonstrable is exactly what constitutes the kind of fanaticism which he deplores in the LaRouchies and the hostile folks from Kokomo, Ocilla, and Queens...

...These are all arguable propositions, and Kirp betrays himself as too much the child of his times when he treats the propositions as if they were demonstrated truths even as he blandly identifies matters of truth and morality as "questions of value...

...From material amassed in dozens of interviews, Kirp selects pointed details and authentic dialogue to dramatize the "conflicting impulses for self-preservation and communion" in 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1990 American society...

...Or what...

...Such tactics were constitutionally questionable, for even speech that offends the sensibilities of the right-minded enjoys the protections of the First Amendment, but the police could cite local ordinances banning sound trucks and requiring permits before leafleting...

...With that cloudy paraphrase of Tocqueville, Professor Kirp drones on: It is the rights embedded in a national covenant that make it so hard for communities to banish the feared and disliked, whether they are Nazis in Skokie, Illinois, or blacks in Forsythe County, Georgia, or street people or homosexuals or children with AIDS...

...But the heart, though it surely knows things which the head does not, must finally obey the head...

...Amid such conflict and the intricate, often farcical machinations of local politics, Kirp uncovers many instances of personal heroism, of quietly competent professionalism, and of simple decency...

...He risks violating charity as well as cogency each time he takes his mildly fanatic stand against fanaticism and moralizes against moralizers...

...Without the intrusive predilections of its author, it might have been something more—and more lasting...

...So Nazis in Skokie, Illinois, have rights we needn't extend to LaRouchies in the Chicago suburb of Wilmette...

...They organized a boycott of the school, the Rays began receiving death threats over the telephone, and late on the night of August 28 the Rays' home was burned to the ground...

...no "depth beyond reason" permits us to suspend the law against contradiction...

...They escorted the sound truck to the edge of town and shooed off the leafleters...

...The result is a distracting contradiction between the kind of community spirit he espouses and the civil libertarian sophomorisms to which he resolutely clings...

...He winds up his reportage with the plausible claim that the stories have "no tidy end...

...Not all these kids (several thousand nationwide, by some estimates) are middle-class, telegenic hemophiliacs who contracted the AIDS virus from contaminated plasma...

...that parental emphasis on chastity is "of uncertain value," while "education" in condom use is the sensible "approach...

...such stories continue, with uncertain resolution...

...By 1985, donor-screening and a heat treatment that destroys the AIDS virus had made plasma safe for the regular care required by hemophiliacs...

...The stories are mostly compelling and sometimes riveting, told with a journalistic flair unusual in the writing of an academician and cut to the tastes of a wide audience...

...In still other cases (occurring in places as diverse as Atascadero, California, and Queens, New York), a community gridlock had to be broken, to no one's complete satisfaction, by bureaucratic or judicial fiat...

...John R. Dunlap teaches English at Santa Clara University...

...22.95 John R. Dunlap Late in August 1987, in the central Florida farming town of Arcadia, an event occurred which flickered across national consciousness momentarily before disappearing into the memory hole of newscopy and editorial comment...

...Off on his tangents as liberal moralizer, he treats too many issues as if they have been settled, as if no counterpoint can be deemed reasonable: that compulsory AIDS testing under any circumstances is bad...

...But this sounds a mite too prim coming after a chapter wherein, just fifteen pages earlier, we get "a civics lesson" to the effect that "when civil discourse breaks down, the concept of rights, interpreted by a judge, ultimately defines the terms of membership in a community...

...Consequently, more and more children infected with the virus have been, and will eventually almost exclusively be, among the offspring of the underclass—children whose mothers are either intravenous drug users or the sexual partners of druggies...

...Apparently miffed, for instance, by Norman Podhoretz's public roasting of homosexual behavior ("AIDS," Podhoretz wrote in a syndicated column, "is almost entirely a disease caught by men who bugger and are buggered by dozens or even hundreds of other men every year"), Kirp refers to the Commentary editor as "[New York] Post columnist Norman Podhoretz," rather like identifying William F. Buckley, Jr., as a New England harpsichordist...

...Lurking behind many of Kirp's assumptions about social policy and human behavior is an implicit atomism, an extreme form of the "don't tread on me" individualism which he explicitly rejects...

...Reporters came to poke and pry"), his wit is often more catty than biting...

...In his chapter on Chicago, for example, we get the following bit of folk wisdom mingled with a description of obnoxious LaRouchite kooks broadcasting their message from a sound truck: Wilmette police quickly put a stop to this campaign...

...in others, like that of Mark Hoyle in Swansea, Massachusetts, the townspeople drew together as a "community of openness...

...There is an added complication to the more recent tales of schoolchildren with AIDS, foreshadowed by some of the stories in Learning by Heart...

...With names changed to protect privacy, Learning by Heart also has a few tales about severely troubled underclass kids who are less obviously attractive than Ryan White or Mark Hoyle...

...Clifford and Louise Ray—the parents of three young hemophiliacs who had all been infected with the AIDS virus—had secured a federal court ruling that their three boys be allowed to attend the local grade school...

...These five assistants receive minor billing on the dust cover...

...others, with no evidence that the children pose any hazard to public health, will find ways to treat such kids as pariahs...

...All too often, he allows the voices of the turgid academic and the smug liberal to horn in on what seems to be his preferred voice as the journalist faithful to his story...

...Kirp, a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley, makes this point forcefully in an essay for the Public Interest ("The AIDS Perplex," Summer 1989), wherein he argues that community support will become even less certain for children with AIDS "as AIDS is increasingly ghettoized...