Slips of the Tongue . . .and the Ear

Some people should get better grips on their lips.

Just when her career is starting to take off, for example, that stickler for propriety Ann Landers has to apologize for calling Pope John Paul II a “Polack.” And CBS golf commentator Ben Wright, a civil-sounding Britisher who speaks like he was born in a bowler, is reproached for allegedly saying that lesbian golfers harm the sport and that “boobs” hamper the female golf swing.

The big mystery is what hampers the brains of boobs who utter slurs.

You’d want to include in that crowd Howard Stern, the present toast of Los Angeles literati. The book-promoting Stern spent some of last week here wooing TV reporters and other amnesiacs who appeared to have forgotten that only last April he was saying on his national radio show that fans of slain Latina singer Selena “live in refrigerator boxes . . . like to make love to a goat and . . . like to dance with velvet paintings and eat beans.” For good measure, on the day of her funeral he played her music with the sound of gunfire in the background. It was Stern being Stern, but when protests from Latinos were too plentiful to ignore, he apologized--in Spanish.

*

Stern is hardly unique in getting heat for making clumsy remarks that many interpret as racist. Sportscaster Howard Cosell once caught it big time for saying on ABC that a black running back scampered like “a little monkey.” In 1981, “60 Minutes” star Mike Wallace was in San Diego preparing for a segment on the plight of mostly poor Californians, including a black and a Latino, when he was captured on tape saying about the complexity of reading some sales contracts: “You bet your ass they are hard to read . . . if you’re reading them over the watermelon or over the tacos.” Wallace later said he was joking.

Meanwhile, it was his comments about blacks on “Nightline” that cost Al Campanis his job as Dodgers general manager. Bumbling Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder was fired by CBS Sports for what he said about African Americans in an interview. And in 1990, CBS briefly suspended “60 Minutes” commentator Andy Rooney for dicey statements attributed to him in a magazine interview about African Americans (he denied saying those) and gays (he didn’t deny saying those).

It’s difficult knowing just when the tongue and brain are--or are not--in sync, for you can’t see what’s in a person’s heart.

Curious, though, how inconsistently charges of prejudice are applied.

Flash back to early June, when Republican Assemblyman Bill Morrow of Oceanside was slammed for remarking about newly installed (and since recalled) Speaker Doris Allen, a renegade Republican: “The first thing she ought to do is her hair.” That was snide and condescending. No one publicly judges the coifs of males in the Assembly.

On the same day, however, former Speaker Willie Brown, a Democrat, was quoted in The Times as saying something that, to my knowledge, drew no public criticism. Not even a raised eyebrow. Heady with victory after securing the speaker’s job for the Democrat-friendly Allen without a single GOP vote, a gloating Brown, who is African American, said about the outmaneuvered Republicans: “Those white boys got taken, fair and square.”

Yes, it was only a figure of speech. Yet imagine the outraged response had a white assemblyman referred to any group of African Americans as “black boys.”

It’s also noteworthy that, twisted by our own biases, we often read what we want to read and hear what we want to hear, regardless of the reality. The following anecdote applies:

Not long ago, ABC’s “Nightline” came to Los Angeles for a couple of “Viewpoint” town-meeting telecasts on the just-ended O.J. Simpson trial and its media coverage. As one of many locals on the program, I faulted some of the city’s TV stations for preempting regular programs for live coverage of a Simpson juror’s press conference while not airing live the same day’s arrival of the pope in the United States. Although the pope lacked the following of Geraldo Rivera, I added, sarcastically (and, of course, inaccurately), “He’s not exactly chopped liver.”

The next few days brought a batch of calls and letters lambasting me for supposedly ridiculing the pope when, in fact, my point was that he, not a Simpson juror, was the one deserving of live coverage, and that he’d been victimized by TV news priorities.

Could viewers possibly have believed, moreover, that by saying the pope wasn’t chopped liver, I was actually comparing him unfavorably with a traditional Jewish dish? Yes, they could. Yes, they did.

Near the end of the same program, Dominique R. Shelton of the Black Women Lawyers Assn. of Los Angeles complained on the air that Simpson coverage had been slanted against the defendant, specifically claiming that a print reporter had used “slick,” “slimy” and “low” to describe Simpson’s lead attorney, Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. Someone behind her blurted out, incorrectly, that I was that reporter.

After the program, I found Shelton and insisted that I had never written that about Cochran. I do regard him as slick but not slimy or low, and, in any case, had not used those words in print to describe him.

Shelton insisted that I had. “You do it all the time,” added someone with her. Then Shelton promised to fax me clippings that would prove I was the guilty writer.

Nineteen days later, I received from Shelton a copy of a 68-page mailing she had sent to Ted Koppel consisting of press clippings that she regarded as biased. One was a New York Times article whose description of Cochran as being “charismatic” had been underlined, apparently as an example of anti-Cochran writing. That spoke for itself.

As for the promised proof of my prominence in this anti-Cochran conspiracy, Shelton included a column of mine saying that he had “preached eloquently” and delivered a “pulpit talk” to the jury. Just how this translated to “slick,” “slimy” and “low” is unclear.

Much clearer is that what you have said or written often matters less than what people are predisposed to believe you have said or written. And when paranoia and siege mentalities prevail, and when the worst is expected of everyone, you cannot change their minds.