Cultural Elite or a Free-Thinking Multitude? : Ugly Tactics Underlie Quayle’s Rhetoric

In his review of the Emmys (“A Long Evening With TV’s Cultural Elite,” Calendar, Aug. 31), Howard Rosenberg complained that some of the attacks on Vice President Dan Quayle “weren’t pretty.”

Granted, this year’s Emmys dragged on way too long and had many dull moments. However, Rosenberg misses a crucial point--people in the entertainment business have learned the hard way that if they don’t fight back when politicians attack them, nobody else will.

When Quayle attacked the “Hollywood elite,” there were no senators explaining the spirit as well as the letter of the First Amendment, nor congressmen pointing out the trade surplus the entertainment business gives this country, or reminding Quayle that America’s culture and entertainment is our country’s most beloved and best known product around the world.

Over the past decade, as the extreme right has repeatedly smeared entertainers and linked creative work with every imaginable social ill, there has been a deafening silence from Democrats as well as Republicans who know better.

Some pundits have suggested that while Quayle’s attack on “Murphy Brown” was ill conceived, the general notion of a political discussion of “values” has merit. This is a naive view that accepts Quayle’s rationale at face value while ignoring the ugly political tactics underlying his rhetoric.

In their attacks on show business, Quayle and other cultural conservatives seem to be saying that the content of art and entertainment can literally cause behavior identical to what is depicted. Yet in a recent Life magazine profile of the Quayle family, the vice president’s 13-year-old daughter Corine was revealed to be reading the novel “Wuthering Heights” with the enthusiastic approval of her parents.

The Emily Bronte novel is an unremittingly negative portrayal of a miserably unhappy family, focusing on the unrequited love the mean-spirited protagonist Heathcliff has for his step-sister. It seems unlikely that the Quayles would want Corine to emulate any of the characters in the book.

So even the conservatives who in other contexts clamor for appreciation of “Western culture” seem to recognize that artistic depictions of immoral or degenerate behavior can lead to a transcendent uplifting experience. However, they apparently think such themes can only be properly expressed by dead European white people.

Quayle’s attack is even less credible when one considers that they contradict two major conservative theories. Conservatives always insist on the personal responsibility of criminals for their acts, ridiculing attacks on “root causes” as irrelevant in fighting crime. Quayle’s twisted logic suggests that antisocial behavior can be “caused” by exposure to an episode of a sitcom but not influenced by poverty, abusive foster care and the like.

Even more striking is the contradiction between Quayle’s insistence on a political intrusion into intimate family matters while his primary passion in government has been for removing government from business in his role as head of the Competitiveness Council. The same Republican convention that cheered at the idea of political pressure on Hollywood called for the eventful removal of government funding and involvement in public broadcasting.

Talk about wanting to have it both ways! The most dramatic example of the insincerity of the “Hollywood elite” attack was the high-profile inclusion at the Republican convention of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis and Tanya Tucker whose work, by any standard, is morally indistinguishable from the preponderance of mainstream Hollywood product.

Thus the depth of Hollywood’s outrage at Quayle is a recognition of the base and bigoted emotions his rhetoric is really aimed at. Attacks on rap music are aimed at seducing white racists. The smear of “Murphy Brown” is served up to attract anti-feminists and woman haters.

The repeated Quayle complaint that the cultural elite says that “every so-called lifestyle alternative is morally equivalent” is transparently gay-bashing. And as comedian Billy Crystal recently said, “Every time they say the phrase ‘Hollywood elite’ you can hear the unspoken word ‘Jew.’ ”

Undoubtedly, some of Quayle’s rhetoric is a wink at the constituency of former Republican presidential candidate David Duke who, in a 1983 article, wrote: “. . . media, I mean movies and TV . . . is more a reflection of Jewish values than Western values. These Jews are not good Americans.”

Although the ACLU as an institution does not endorse political candidates, I personally am a lifelong Democrat and am a supporter of the Clinton-Gore ticket, if for no other reason than the federal judges who will be appointed in the next four years. But Hollywood cannot afford to walk on eggs and solely rely on quiet but benign Democrats to come to their rescue. History has not been kind to groups who remain silent when they are attacked.

Better to fight back with bad jokes than no jokes at all.