F L O R E N C E
K I N G
Miss King is the author of The Florence King Reader and other books.
YOU see before you, as it were, a woman who has yielded to the forces of change. It rarely happens but there are some things we just can't fight, so I gave up and moved the red flag in my quotations notebook.This is the little plastic gizmo I use to mark my all-time favorite idiotic statement by a brain-dead American leader, to help me find it fast amid the cluster of slightly less idiotic statements by American leaders still capable of registering an occasional blip on the EEG machine. One must discriminate in this life.
The red flag had been on the same page for 28 years. I remember the day in 1969 that I put it there. Richard Nixon had just had his first Supreme Court nominee, Clement F. Haynsworth, shot down. He named another, G. Harrold Carswell, but the flak started again. Citing the many times Judge Carswell's decisions had been reversed on appeal, the Democrats called him a ``legal mediocrity.''
Into the breach rode Nebraska's Sen. Roman L. Hruska, who proved that he had been shortchanged of more than a vowel when he said in defense of Carswell: ``Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. Aren't they entitled to a little representation and a little chance? We can't have all Brandeises and Cardozos and Frankfurters and stuff like that. I doubt we can. I doubt we want to.''
Compared to today, this could be said to represent a Golden Age of American public discourse. At least he got the subjunctive right, though that may have been an accident, but except for the descent into ``stuff'' it wasn't all that bad; his sentences parsed, he did not ramble or equivocate, and his thumping anti-intellectualism did not really offend most Americans. His only mistake was voicing what oft was thought but ne'er so baldly expressed.
But enough of nostalgic longing for Hruska of the silver tongue. It's 1997 now and my little red flag has passed to Sara Lister, the latest fallen woman in Army Secretary Togo West's Department of Ill Repute, who said: ``The Marine Corps is -- you know, they have all these checkerboard fancy uniforms and stuff. But the Army is sort of muddy boots on the ground.''
I'm waiting for the translation. I looked at my checkerboard and I looked at a picture of a Marine in dress blues but I still don't get it. Did she mean that both feature two colors? Did she mean that the Marines are squares? Hardly, since she also said: ``I think the Army is much more connected to society than the Marines are. The Marines are extremists. Wherever you have extremists, you've got the risk of total disconnection from society, and that's a little dangerous.''
Why did she pull back to ``a little'' dangerous after saying ``extremists'' and ``total''? Probably for the same reason she tossed ``sort of'' in front of the muddy boots. Public statements are such minefields nowadays that speakers sprinkle their sentences with these adverbial sweetmeats to keep from sounding mean, but in fact they sound like coy zealots in the manner of Newt Gingrich, who called the Rush Limbaugh show and said of Bill Kristol: ``I've concluded that he thinks he has to make news by pandering to the liberals every week and has become sort of the most destructive element on the right.''
As a long-time collector of idiotic statements I've noticed that where race once inspired the most sublime idiocies, today's Best Of are inspired by women in the military. They are also much easier to find. Key phrases fairly leap off the page: ``pregnant sailors . . . Army called too aggressive . . . lighter and less dangerous hand grenades . . . stepladders added to obstacle courses . . . a training program to stamp out profanity at Fort Hood . . . the possibility of single mothers taking babies to war . . . ''
These are statements to read through spread fingers, the way jurors look at autopsy photos. Morning papers are especially dangerous because sudden movements can make you spill hot coffee in your lap.
Maj. Cindy Sito, Army spokesman in Haiti, where our male and female soldiers sleep in the same tent: ``In my opinion, it's easier to run a unit if you're able to reach out and touch everybody.''
Capt. Rosemary Mariner, naval aviator: ``No amount of nostalgia over manly warriors protecting fair maidens erases the fact that this country cannot go to war without women on the front lines.''
The Rand Corporation report on how female sailors improve life at sea: ``We used to hear stories of men who used to be quite malodorous due to infrequent bathing; now their male peers appreciate that such men seem to take better care of their hygiene when working in the presence of women.''
Somebody else said the best way to stop sexual harassment is to create an incest taboo between male and female troops. I can't find the clipping so I can't give you chapter and verse, but I remember it only too well because of the coffee blister. WHAT kind of statements are issuing from fearless Republicans on the pro-military side? Most of them sound like Dan Coats, President Pro Temporizer of the Senate: ``Whether or not it's better to have a female drill instructor, as the Marine Corps does, work in the initial training phase with women, and males with males, and then integrate those into the services, I think it's something worth exploring.''
And explore he will, on a Magellanesque scale. ``I am ready to talk to the Secretary of Defense, to talk to military leaders, to continue to visit training units and others around the world,'' he vowed, bloviating a sailwind for himself rather than face down Pentagon feminists who are submitting our military men to the kind of surgery performed by the Magellan of the famous exam paper, who, said its schoolboy author, ``circumcised the globe with his clipper.''
