If We Silence Bigots, How Do We Measure Our Progress?

Feel better now?

Did a few minutes of gazing at Rorschach blots, a few hours of couch confessionals about Mom and Dad, a few history lessons on Martin Luther King Jr. and Susan B. Anthony and Cesar Chavez make John Rocker into a new man, a better man?

I’m not asking Rocker.

Nor am I asking those who took offense at the Atlanta Braves pitcher’s Neanderthalisms about minorities and homosexuals and women and foreigners and New Yorkers--did I leave out anyone? Who wouldn’t take it personally, when a man who never met you can’t stand you?

I put the question to those who applauded when Rocker was ordered to undergo psychological testing. After all, a bigmouth bigot who seethes with such disdain has to have a screw loose, right?

Perhaps. But this is not like rehabilitating a player with a torn rotator cuff on his throwing arm.

This has a whiff of the gulag about it, a tinge of re-education camps, of the old Soviet “mental hospitals” whose “patients” were political dissidents.

Where exactly was John Rocker sent--to the showers, or to a brainwashing?

What is America if not a place where any boy can grow up to be a dumb-as-mud jerk? And so John Rocker has.

And what is America if not a place where the rest of us can choose to have nothing to do with such a man? Not inviting him to dinner if he’s a neighbor, not cheering his team if he’s an athlete.

Does anyone believe that pro sports is lying awake nights worrying about the mental welfare of John Rocker? Pro sports has demonstrated a relaxed sense of outrage about its wife-beaters and coked-up brawlers who get busted on Friday and suit up on Sunday without any evident dent in team profits. But if John Rocker’s big mouth stands to cost them big bucks, then John Rocker’s mouth must be curbed. It isn’t about morality. It’s about venality--box office, baby, box office.

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About the same time that Rocker was playing equal-opportunity offender, the Directors Guild of America, after nearly 50 years of bestowing a career achievement award named for silent film pioneer D.W. Griffith, decided to rename its honor.

Griffith is credited with creating the close-up, the location shoot, the editing techniques of cross-cutting and fade-outs. He directed “Orphans of the Storm” and “Intolerance” and “Hearts of the World” and the film “Broken Blossoms,” in which a young woman terrorized by her brute of a father is loved tenderly by a Chinese man--an interracial romance, imagine!

But in this year of grace 2000, Griffith’s name is being removed from the award because his 1915 movie “The Birth of a Nation” has some of the most horrid images of black Americans ever to appear on film.

Who shall the award be named for, then? Oliver Stone, whose versions of history are as fanciful as they are cinematic? Kevin Costner, who has offended no one but inspired nothing? Elia Kazan, who won the Griffith award in 1987 and then, last year, as he received a special Oscar for the same body of work, was booed for having named names during the McCarthy era?

All this merely dithers at the suburbs of the nation’s true difficulties. In the absence of meaningful politics and meaty debate, we piggyback social discourse onto life’s electives, like sports and movies, using them as substitutes for getting at the real thing, and congratulating ourselves for it.

Send John Rocker to a shrink. Expunge Griffith’s name from an award. A fine day’s work, no? We sure took care of racism, didn’t we?

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Somewhere along the line we came to look upon history--last week’s, or last century’s--as a pencil sketch, to be erased or redrawn if it doesn’t suit us. If it isn’t there, it didn’t happen.

But how can we know whether we are better, if we can’t see how we were worse? Wiping it out, banning race-ridden language in “Huckleberry Finn,” altering the caricatures of “Oliver Twist” also obliterates the mile markers of progress. A John Rocker is useful in reminding us that a couple of decades ago, his bleatings would have troubled almost no one.

A lot of us, I suspect, would not have liked our great-grandparents’ thinking or their politics; our great-grandchildren may very likely find us to be hopelessly backward.

And, in centuries to come, who knows but that the aliens who emigrate from other galaxies to Planet Earth will be disgusted by Steven Spielberg’s depiction of them as squat, waddling and wrinkled, and demand that the Academy melt down his Oscars?

Patt Morrison substitutes today for columnist Mike Downey, who is on vacation. Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.