(FORTUNE Magazine) – MARIAN ADRIFT

On the C-SPAN screen, the Stand for Children rally in Washington, D.C., seemed a very big deal. Visually it contained elements of massive Billy Graham revival meetings and Maoist outpourings in Beijing stadiums. The park police head count (200,000 or so) must have pleased Children's Defense Fund impresario Marian Wright Edelman, who organized it all. But as the hours wore on, one was feeling almost sorry for Marian. Well, not really.

Her problem, rated quite serious, is her near-total isolation in the realm of ideas. Almost nobody, and certainly not former CDF Chairwoman Hillary Clinton or her spouse, any longer buys the ritualistic view of child poverty propounded by Marian--the view that it is caused by insufficient spending on the poor. The current debate on welfare makes it pikestaff plain that just about every policymaker in Washington now knows much of this spending is counterproductive: It works to enlarge the number of poor children (now about 15 million) by inducing millions of young mothers to enter the world of welfare dependency and permanent poverty. Marian's own presentation at the rally's end gave one the sense that, having staged the whole event, she didn't know what to say. What possible purpose except filling up time could have been served by those endless slow-motion incantations about all the groups standing up for children: "parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, older siblings, neighbors, professionals and laborers, educators and students, religious, business, community" and quite a few more, mysteriously including "conservatives," after which, a few minutes later, she was slicing the bread another way, solemnly marveling that the stand-uppers included "red, white, brown, black, and yellow, young and old, rich, middle-class, and poor, female and male, physically and mentally challenged" and more. But not Republican or Democratic leaders. Sad, eh? Or perhaps not really.

HOAX!

Here is a question needing to be pondered by the people: Could Chico Marx get away with it today? By "it" one alludes of course to the ethnic insensitivity implicit in the coarse subliterate persona and the klutzy Italianate accent wherein approval gets rendered as "Datsa nice!" and Harpo's mysterious muteness is explained by "He no-a speak." Could Chico, if magically resurrected, do the act today? Somehow one doubts it, and one has a larger stake in the question than you possibly realize.

Your servant has been thinking a lot about Chico ever since zeroing in on the Social Text hoax. Social Text is a now deeply depressed radical journal of cultural studies, published by Duke University Press and evidently run by 29 editors, or at least that is the number listed alphabetically in the "editorial collective" you run into at the top of their masthead, a designation heavily hinting that it was only a question of time before they got into deep dung. Endlessly preoccupying the collective is the injustice of present race-class-gender arrangements here on our planet, and the attendant need for dizzying articles demanding postmodern, deconstructionist, and multicultural revolution while flirting dangerously with total incoherence. When you tap into the Social Text World Wide Web site, you see a button called links. Click on this button, and you see a list of the editors' radical buddies, ranging from EcoNet to the Little Red Web Page. Click on Little Red, and the menu offers, inter alia, Marxist, anarchist, Zapatist, and Noam Chomsky Web pages. Click on Marxism, and you get nothing about Chico but are enabled to download the lyrics to "The Internationale" while also noting that as of June 5, 11,859 folks had logged on since February 5.

The current angst at Social Text reflects the contribution of Alan Sokal, a New York University physics professor who had the inspired idea of submitting a nonsensical essay to the journal. Entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," it gravely calls for a "liberatory postmodern science," in which the people are no longer tyrannized by the idea of an objective reality, also for an "emancipatory mathematics." You gotta love it. This article got 35 pages in the spring-summer issue, exactly 17.5 times one's own page budget, and no sooner was it published than Sokal turned up in the academic magazine Lingua Franca to gloatingly announce that his contribution was "self-indulgent nonsense." The parody was written, he said, to directly demonstrate the debased intellectual standards of academic subcultures producing journals like Social Text.

Unastoundingly, this all came as a hammer blow to the collective. One of its members, cited in an "editorial response" downloadable on the Web, was said to have been clinging wishfully to the view that the article might not be a parody at all but a genuine contribution to postmodern thought, and that its author felt obliged to renounce it, presumably because the ruling class would persecute him or something. Other members of the collective contented themselves with reviling Sokal for dirty tricks. They reminded one of the Daily Worker's editors in 1950.

Here this item suddenly turns autobiographical. Back at mid-century, your then-callow correspondent was striving to establish a career as a professional redbaiter. Looking for baitable material, he read every day's issue of the Daily Worker, official organ of the U.S. Communist Party. He soon noticed that an extraordinary amount of nuttiness was generated by the paper's coverage of what it termed "white chauvinism."

The format was always the same. Over and over again, a reporter would write something perfectly innocuous, would then be told he had unconsciously engaged in chauvinism, and would apologize abjectly. Once it was for calling a Chinese athlete intelligent--the implication being, as noted in the apologia, that there was something remarkable about smart Chinese. Another time the apology was for calling boxing immortal Sugar Ray Robinson by that name, somebody having decided that the "Sugar" was chauvinist.

Finally, there came a time when the Daily Worker movie critic wrote a highly favorable review of a biography of the Marx Brothers. The review was soon enough berated in a letter to the editor, signed "Jos. Antonelli," for the "slanderous caricature" of Italians by Chico Marx. This led to the usual self-abasement by the movie critic: "The review was a brief one...but that does not excuse its failure to mention the chauvinistic stereotype used by Chico Marx." Guess who really wrote the letter to the editor.

Actually, the people of America did not have to guess, as your servant instantly and gleefully wrote all about it in the New Leader. This triggered one's all-time favorite Daily Worker headline: HE MADE LIKE A COMMUNIST TO PRETEND HE WAS DECENT. Later one prevailed on Newsweek's press writer to further highlight the hoax. What fun.

And yet...and yet one cannot shake off a sense that half a century later, the world view driving Daily Worker looniness increasingly prevails in the culture. Chico's act would not fly today. Comics using dialect stuff are now judged candidates for sensitivity training.

Can emancipatory math be far behind?

DOWN WITH SPORTSWRITERS

Important disclaimer: We have thought long and prayerfully about certain themes foreshadowed in the headline, and this item would have run even if Dave Anderson of the New York Times had not demanded a five-game suspension of Cleveland slugger Albert Belle, accused of unsportsmanlike conduct going into second base, all of which led media-driven American League President Gene Budig to impose a suspension of would-you-believe exactly five games on Albert, thereby depriving him of about 20 at-bats in 1996, which, given his 10% or so HR/at-bat ratio, translates into two "expected" home runs, thereby materially diminishing one's prospects of winning $400 from the big man in Omaha, who says Roger Maris's seasonal swat record of 61 will not fall this year.

A cherished piece of the Babe Ruth legend is the tale of the four baseball writers playing bridge in the club car of the Yankees' train one day in the Twenties, when suddenly the Bambino himself materialized, racing through the car and being pursued by a screaming young seminude woman with a butcher knife. One of the writers was Fred Lieb of the Sporting News, who later reported that when the romantic couple had vanished into the next car, the writers briefly considered the implications of the scene they had witnessed but did not leave the table. The first words uttered were: "Whose deal?"

We judge this response to be inadequate and yet on the whole preferable to the sportswriter-as-ethicist act now endlessly on display. Who needs experts on split-finger fastballs to rule that teams with Indian names are insensitive? Why do we have leading authorities on goal-tending strategy who do not recognize market efficiency when they see it and view ticket scalping as social injustice, making it tough "for the ordinary working stiff to take his kid to see a hockey game" (Montreal Gazette, March 5)?

One's impression is that left-liberal sensibilities on the sports page suddenly bloomed in the mid-Seventies. Having got into the business because they were nuts about baseball or whatever, the guys began to feel uneasy stirrings, a sense of, shall we say, inadequacy, as other journalists in the Watergate decade increasingly cast themselves as (drum roll!) social critics, not just reporters.

So now the sports byliners are driven to find moral issues everyplace. They demand fines, suspensions, and you name it for all the flawed characters in sports, including many we do not even have a bet on. Players defying the establishment by not standing up for "The Star-Spangled Banner" do much better with the media, certainly with Robert Lipsyte of the New York Times, who recently lauded nonstander Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf of the Denver Nuggets for his "individualism." Team owners in all sports count as part of the establishment and take heavy hits. Terence Moore of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was recently proclaiming National Football league owners "the greediest" and wondering which of several owners contemplating moves to other cities deserved the MHP (Most Heartless Person) award. Marge Schott, owner of the Cincinnati Reds, is chronically in trouble for her retrograde views, most recently for saying Hitler was okay but "went too far," also for positing that a woman's place is in the home. Who cares what Marge says? And if you do care, what about the awkward fact that her regime, now also in suspension, has offered the lowest ticket prices (admissions as low as $3.50) in major league baseball, which ought to be a problem for all the writers moralizing about owner greed. They're socialists and don't even know it, and that doesn't seem to be grounds for suspension.