Pining for Jesse Jackson to Talk That Talk

Presidential candidates always have something to say about the plight of inner-city kids. But which candidate, earlier in his career, addressed impoverished high school students with these words:

“If you challenged to play some white suburban team in basketball, you say, ‘Bring ‘em on!’ But when it comes to math and literature and science you must also say, ‘Bring ‘em on!’ . . . Let the challenges come! Just because you were born in a slum doesn’t mean the slum was born in you--you can rise above it! Up to you now! Up to you now!”

Paul Tsongas? Bill Clinton? Right. George Bush? Get real.

There’s only been one candidate in history who could talk that talk. It’s hard to imagine a person of any political persuasion reading the extraordinary three-part New Yorker series on Jesse Jackson and not pining for those less anemic elections when Jackson was in there shaking things up.

Marshall Frady’s book-length trilogy began two weeks ago. The first piece discussed the 1988 election, the second focused on Jackson’s childhood. It all comes together this week in a concluding article that is certainly more stirring than anything that will be written about this year’s crop of candidates.

Frady, who has spent an enormous amount of time with Jackson over the years, presents a portrait that is at once intimate and detached.

He skillfully weaves the conflicting threads of Jackson’s complex personality and philosophies, hitting the controversies head-on--Farrakhan, hymietown, PUSH--and hammering Jackson for his grandiosity and attention-mongering.

At the same time, though, Frady subtly shames the media for an almost petulant refusal to honestly explore Jackson’s charisma.

The series climaxes with a behind-the-scenes account of Jackson’s unofficial negotiations with Saddam Hussein in Iraq before the Gulf War--negotiations that effectively triggered the release of American hostages there and in Kuwait City.

It’s a gripping yarn, shedding considerable light on Jackson and the way most Americans perceive him.

REQUIRED READING

* There probably isn’t a radio talk show or water cooler in the country where people haven’t heatedly compared and contrasted the William Kennedy Smith and Mike Tyson rape verdicts.

But armchair jurors can’t judge fairly for one important reason: The public actually saw the Smith trial; its access to the Tyson trial was limited by restrictions on television cameras.

“How the Willie Smith Show Changed America,” in the January-February the American Lawyer, doesn’t even mention Tyson. But it leaves readers believing they have been shortchanged by the absence of cameras at the boxer’s trial.

Steven Brill--editor of American Lawyer and the man responsible for Courtroom Television Network’s gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Smith trial--argues persuasively that there is much to gain and little to lose in such media access.

For one thing, Brill says, increased televised coverage may dispel the myth of Absolute Judicial Truth implanted in the average American’s mind by Perry Mason.

“For a while there may be a period of disillusionment, even cynicism . . . But what will gradually set in . . . will be a new reverence for a process that isn’t ever universally satisfying and that isn’t perfect (which means that the reverence will be accompanied by demands to fix what’s wrong), but that does deliver and convey basic justice with reassuring regularity.”

* The Washingtonian asked 1,100 Congressional staff members which lawmakers they’d most like to see thrown out of office. For every member of the opposition party they wanted to dump, they had to also choose someone from their own.

The “winners,” listed in the February issue, include: Democratic Senators Howard Metzenbaum, Chuck Robb, Ted Kennedy, Paul Wellstone and Alan Cranston and Republicans Jesse Helms, Alfonse D’Amato, Strom Thurmond, Orrin Hatch and Alan Simpson.

The staffers also wished for the departures of House Democrats Gus Savage, James Traficant, Pat Schroeder, Henry Gonzales and Barbara Boxer, and House Republicans William Dannemeyer, Robert Walker, Newt Gingrich, Bob Dornan and Dan Burton.

* There are objective ways to compare riveters. But how can one be sure whether an artist’s work was rejected for lack of merit or because of gender, sexual orientation or the color of the artist’s (or the subject’s) skin?

The current issues of American Writer (the journal of the National Writers Union) and the Journal of the Writers Guild of America West address bias and discrimination in publishing and film and television industries.

Both publications find a continuing problem. Screenwriters, says John Voland in the guild’s Journal, not only have a hard time proving discrimination, but often refuse to address it for fear of being labeled difficult--and instead sink into self doubt.

There is a downside to concerted protest, however.

Besides opening doors and confronting stereotypes, the increasingly vociferous outcry by aggrieved groups has inspired a new timidity, Voland says.

Some writers and producers (including those belonging to aggrieved groups) “are censoring themselves, either by altering characters to suit the requirements of the activists, or by devoting themselves to mainstream projects that couldn’t possibly invoke their ire.”

NEW ON NEWSSTANDS

Imagine Archie as a pimp, Jughead as a pedophile, Betty and Veronica on crack, and you’ve got a sense of the cast in Hard Looks, a new “anthology comic magazine.”

It features stories by Andrew Vachss, a popular suspense novelist who picked up his street sensibilities as an attorney for abused children in New York City.

Readers looking for Smurf-style uplift may shy away from these tales. One story in the premiere issue follows two security guards as they casually toss the body of their rape victim into a toxic waste dump and then become chew toys for a pack of attack dogs.

The illustrations in this Dark Horse Comics release are as edgy as the dialogue, and that’s the sort of bluff chatter Raymond Chandler might be writing if he’d spent a few more decades on Hollywood Boulevard: “I sprayed a lot of shots around the plush, private office, after I made sure the first one got him in the head.”

This parody (intentional?) of the sleazoid life is devoid of socially redeeming qualities. But the publisher has pledged a piece of the profits to a Portland, Ore., youth services organization. ($2.50 on newsstands. Dark Horse Comics Inc., 10956 SE Main St., Milwaukie, Ore. 97222; (503) 652-8815.)

SHREDDER FODDER

* By now, even the looniest feel-good guru ever to set up a tepee in Sedona, Ariz., must realize that all this self-esteem stuff is out of hand. But who needs a Newsweek cover story to say so?

In recent months the newsweeklies have, by and large, cast aside objective reporting in favor of more pointed reportage.

While Newsweek’s lampoon scores many points against the movement, the article’s “crush the quacks” tone leaves little room for discussion on the legitimate underpinnings of the esteem-building philosophy.