Comment
COMMENT Courting Disaster Hysteria is back. The Supreme Court's ruling that burning an American flag is a form of symbolic speech protected by the First Amendment brought it to the White House and...
...Among reporters, there was a moment or two of befuddlement (the I-thought-he-was-a-good-guy reaction), but memory is not required in the news business, and soon the media reverted to their usual communism-is-evil script...
...For years, Deng Xiaoping was the media's and the Government's darling...
...But Bush has no plans to ask Congress for legislation to restore them...
...The word immiseration is usually encountered only in Marxist tracts...
...The watered-down bill deemed excessively generous by the President would hardly have been a bonanza for the millions of Americans condemned to work at minimum wage...
...No one at the Gallery pretended that the caliber of Mapplethorpe's work was at issue, or that it was deemed unfit for exhibition...
...At that point, the Corcoran, which relies on Congressional appropriations for some of its funding, cancelled the show...
...Now that's punishment...
...that public employees (including physicians and nurses) not perform abortions...
...And they will find ways to have them if Roe is overturned next term...
...It has taken much of the Left in America almost seventy years to apply a universal human-rights standard...
...No matter who wins, though, one thing won't change...
...The First Amendment, not the American flag, is the sacred object at the foundation of our freedom...
...But it is more than a personal relationship: The Reagan Administration, after all, eagerly cleared the way for U.S...
...But President Bush wants—for the first time in the nation's history—to amend the First Amendment, and he unveiled his plan with much hoopla at the Iwo Jima Memorial...
...Then it was booked into the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C...
...George Bush, as is his wont, has made a vice out of consistency...
...It seems to have been clear to a majority of the justices that protecting his right to do so is what the First Amendment is for...
...Both offer further opportunities to chip away at Roe v. Wade—which Chief Justice William Rehnquist's majority opinion promises to do...
...Some of his work, explicitly and even brutally erotic, was controversial, disturbing, and, to certain viewers, deeply offensive...
...The Court has also agreed to hear three more abortion cases next term...
...An inveterate bridge player, Deng was reportedly in the midst of a tournament while his troops swept through Tiananmen Square...
...Chip, chip, chip...
...The right to consider abortion when faced with an unwanted pregnancy, and then to have an abortion in medical safety, is another right that Americans have held for sixteen years...
...The immediate result will be chaos in every state legislature...
...In Wards Cove v. Atonio, it reversed an eighteen-year-old precedent and made it more difficult for women and minorities to use statistics to prove discrimination and eased the burdens on employers trying to insulate themselves from liability for bias...
...It was a close call, as nearly all the Court's decisions are these days, but the issue is constitutionally so straightforward that the lonely liberal trio—William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, and Harry Blackmun—was joined by Reagan appointees Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy to provide a five-to-four edge...
...Quayle Meets Killer Did you hear the latest Dan Quayle joke...
...When Deng called in the troops, only a few stray voices on the American Left could be heard mumbling apologies for the repression...
...The implications for the arts are less comforting...
...Presumably, the Gallery's cowardly course will leave its Federal funding intact...
...This is a tragedy of major proportions...
...Bush has proven himself incapable of manifesting outrage at the most blatant human-rights abuses...
...Two years ago, at a party he tossed for the Supreme Court press corps on the occasion of the anniversary of the Bill of Rights, he remarked that he personally would have preferred to celebrate the anniversary of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, but his staff talked him out of it...
...Time magazine twice annointed Deng "Man of the Year," and the media ignored the neo-Stalinist reality of Deng's China, as Maurice Meisner pointed out in The Progressive back in October 1986...
...By consensus of both major parties, the minimum wage has been declining, in real terms, for years...
...Before Quayle's visit, no U.S...
...Even those politicians who don't really care to mess with the Constitution are scared stiff of what will happen in the next election to those who vote "against the flag...
...Too high a minimum, it is alleged, will drive small businesses into bankruptcy, will result in layoffs of marginal workers, will deprive teen-agers of sorely needed jobs...
...D'Aubuisson, remember, is the leader of the Death Squads, the guy who ordered the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero...
...But you can tell a lot about a man by the kind of jokes he tells...
...That's U.S...
...But not with China, because there the United States has a "relationship" to preserve...
...a lot of poor women will not...
...Immiseration The House of Representatives stayed up all night to rail at the Supreme Court for its flag-burning decision, but members of Congress lost no sleep over George Bush's veto of the minimum-wage bill...
...The first two rules amount to discrimination against the poor...
...he gets more worked up over flag-burning than about tanks crushing protesters...
...Government...
...But then he continued, "We would modify and narrow Roe and succeeding cases" whenever an appropriate case comes up...
...But it is Thornburgh who is wrong, and Jackson lost no time in telling him so, suggesting that the Bush Administration is placing a higher priority on protecting the flag than on the rights it is supposed to represent...
...The third simply means danger: No fetus is viable at twenty weeks, but the time it takes for the tests makes the delayed abortion that much riskier...
...Robert White, former U.S...
...Ambassador to El Salvador, called D'Aubuisson a "pathological killer...
...But the Supreme Court seems to be headed toward obliterating that right...
...Deng must be crying over his bridge hand...
...there's no doubt about that...
...In Webster, he wrote of Roe that "we leave it undisturbed...
...ties with China as a way to get back at the Soviet Union...
...They had them when they were illegal, before Roe v. Wade...
...Under Bush's minimum-wage proposal—$4.25 an hour by 1992, and 20 per cent less for those receiving a six-month "training wage"— the working poor three years from now would receive the equivalent of $2.97 in current dollars...
...The potential for nasty campaign commercials is unlimited...
...people offended by provocative photos, unlike those who live near nuclear installations, can comfortably stay home/ —Robert Brustein in The New York Times...
...In Martin v. Wilks, it gave white males adversely affected by court-approved affirmative-action plans new authority to file "reverse-discrimination" lawsuits...
...Why, then, worry about the minimum wage at all...
...you won't even find it in most dictionaries...
...George Bush had so much fun last year—and helped himself so much politically—with his Pledge of Allegiance demagoguery that it's no surprise he instantly wrapped himself in the flag again when the Supreme Court delivered its dictum on burning...
...The Court's direction is clear: In Richmond v. Crowson, it declared unconstitutional a Richmond ordinance setting aside 30 per cent of public-works spending for minority contractors...
...The fallacy is that no one has ever proposed too high a minimum wage, and none has been proposed this year...
...But now that D'Au-buisson's ARENA party is in power, Quayle thought he'd drop in for a chat...
...A longtime friend of Deng's, he blathered on about "preserving the relationship...
...So what's funny about that...
...Before the exhibit could open, however, the Endowment grant for a display of Map-plethorpe's art came under fire in the Congress of the United States, where it aroused the ire of such astute art critics as Republican Senators Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Alfonse D'Amato of New York...
...And that should have been that...
...Attorney General Richard Thornburgh went straight to a convention of Jesse Jackson's PUSH organization and told the assembled delegates that if they are under the impression that the Supreme Court has weakened civil-rights law, they are wrong...
...pro-choice forces will fight them all the way...
...Many taxpayers unwillingly contribute to a lot more unpleasant projects than the arts...
...Women with money will be okay...
...And ever since Richard Nixon's time, American Presidents have viewed U.S...
...Adjusted for 1988 dollars, the current $3.35 minimum wage peaked at a value of $5.46 in the late 1960s—and living on minimum wage was no picnic then...
...The Wall Street Journal gleefully announced not long ago that there's no doubt about it: "It is now truly 'the Rehnquist court.' " Rehnquist, the Justice with a sense of humor...
...The arguments advanced by Bush, Congressional Republicans, and a substantial number of Democrats are depressingly familiar...
...But those members of Congress who couldn't bring themselves to override the President's veto of the minimum-wage bill ought to be driven out of office for egregious complicity in the crime of immiseration...
...Liberals and leftists must face the fact that taking issues to the Supreme Court is no longer the way to win...
...Given the spinelessness prevalent on Capitol Hill, he's likely to get what he wants...
...There was much else on the Court's agenda this year, not much of it worth cheering about...
...Anti-abortion forces will dream up restriction after restriction on the performance of abortions, given the Court's invitation...
...He was making a political statement...
...Chipping away at it for this purpose will make it easier to chip away at it again for another purpose...
...That was one of the Court's few decent decisions of 1989...
...And again and again, until we're all wearing gags in public...
...Dismantling minority rights long taken for granted is something else the Court did this term...
...He caused no physical harm to another human being, and he wasn't engaged in arson...
...policy for you...
...In fact, many jobs traditionally regarded as minimum-wage positions simply can't be filled at those scales today...
...The Dallas protester who was sentenced to a year in jail for "desecrating a venerated object" was not committing a criminal act when he lit up the flag...
...The hypocrisy of the U.S...
...Now You See It..., Robert Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS this year at the age of forty-two, was one of the foremost photographers of our time...
...Its numerous setbacks to civil-rights law have the leaders of minority and women's groups promising to bring their case to the streets, however, and the last-minute decision on abortion threatens to bring hysteria not just to the streets but to the dining room, the bedroom, the state capitols, and the back alleys...
...Among the more offensive were the rulings that the execution of juveniles and the mentally retarded does not constitute cruel and unusual punishment, and that death-row convicts need not be provided with lawyers for their appeals...
...Chief Justice...
...media can switch from fawning to fulminating...
...Our language has no commonly accepted word for the deliberate process of plunging people deeper into poverty...
...The immediate result will not be the criminalization of abortions...
...He opposed tepid Congressional sanctions against China, which managed to preserve China's "most-favored-nation" trade status...
...But the craven opportunism of all but a handful of Senators and Representatives in instantly joining him is reprehensible—and this isn't even an election year...
...I made very clear our position on human rights," Quayle said after his meeting with D'Aubuisson...
...First, because those who must still depend on it are the poorest of the working poor, and allowing them to keep up, at least, with the cost of living is a matter of elemental decency...
...corporations to supply China with arms and nuclear technology...
...official had dared to meet publicly with D'Aubuisson...
...That's a pretty sick joke...
...The Democrat-controlled House let the veto stand, failing by thirty-four votes to override it...
...Imagine the reaction if the Soviet government had sent tanks into Red Square, killing hundreds of protesters...
...They overlooked his human-rights abuses and heaped praise upon him for embracing capitalism...
...As Robert Brustein of the American Repertory Theater wrote on the op-ed page of The New York Times, "Once we allow lawmakers to become art critics, we take the first step into the world of Ayatollah Khomeini...
...In In Patterson v. McLean Credit Union, it reversed a thirteen-year-old precedent that allowed broad use of an 1866 civil-rights law to fight racial harassment, saying the old law bars discrimination at the hiring stage but not discriminatory treatment on the job...
...They have had them in safety for sixteen years...
...It was not always so, in the days of Stalin and Mao...
...Bull in the China Shop You can't help but admire the ease with which the U.S...
...Now, after Deng's brutal crackdown on China's democracy movement, the media have rediscovered his regime's repressiveness...
...In many parts of the country, fast-food franchises and other classic minimum-wage employers are already offering more pay than the vetoed bill would have provided by 1992...
...Not funny, Mr...
...Women will have abortions...
...for the Court majority 'I think our recourse has to be political, and I don't mean just electoral politics but the politics of marches and demonstrations.9 -Molly Yard, president of NOW, on the civil-rights cases will get no help from the Administration...
...Speech that offends the majority—and the Government—is exactly what the First Amendment is designed to protect...
...The July decision in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services is bad enough: A state may decree that public hospitals not be used for performing abortions, even if public funds are not involved...
...They date back to the Great Depression, when they were put forward in opposition to the original minimum-wage legislation...
...With the aid of a $30,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the University of Pennsylvania's Institute of Contemporary Art compiled a 150-piece retrospective exhibit of Mapple-thorpe's work...
...Minimum-wage workers would, by definition, fall well below even the Government's penurious "poverty line...
...And as the executions mounted, he suspended high-level talks with Chinese officials...
...Bush and Congress would blare their condemnations, send Moscow's ambassador packing, and sever ties with the offending regime...
...Two involve state laws about parental consent to abortions for teen-agers and the third has to do with excessive regulation of private abortion clinics...
...How long will it take the U.S...
...On the other hand, when it comes to civil-rights law, the President insists that we respect the Supreme Court in its wisdom...
...Members of a fairly broad Congressional coalition did quickly jump in, to their credit, with plans to develop legislation to restore lost rights, but they 'We do not consecrate the flag by punishing its desecration, for in doing so we dilute the freedom that this cherished emblem represents.' —Justice William J. Brennan Jr...
...Rather, said Corcoran Director Christina Orr-Cahal, "there are always practical concerns...
...It was shown to appreciative audiences in Philadelphia and Chicago...
...Quayle went to El Salvador, shook hands with Roberto D'Aubuisson, and told him to behave himself...
...response strains belief...
...The Supreme Court's ruling that burning an American flag is a form of symbolic speech protected by the First Amendment brought it to the White House and the halls of Congress, if not the streets...
...It would have provided a floor of $4.55 an hour by 1992, and first-time workers would have received even less for the initial two months of employment...
...that medical tests on the viability of the fetus be performed at the twenty-week stage...
...And second, because a decline in the real minimum wage has the effect of pushing all low wages downward...
...there's no doubt about that, either...
...And there's no doubt about that...
...he takes a wait-and-see attitude, he says...
...The conservative legacy of the past twenty years is firmly in place...
Vol. 53 • August 1989 • No. 8
