The Hanky Panky Boom

A funny (peculiar, not ha! ha!) thing happened to me as I passed Dan Rottenberg's desk at the Welcomat last Wednesday. I was fresh off an Amtrickle trip from New York, where the day before I had been overdosing on Gary Hart's Rice times as brought to us live and livid by Knight-Ridder's Miami Herald, and where over breakfast coffee I was absorbing the Drexel president's bum pass under a tipsy insurance underwriter's dinner party table in Toronto.

With my usual lack of subtlety, I witticized, "Let's do a sexual harassment issue, Dan."

Quicker than I usually think, he teased me about my expertise "having messed around" with students at Beaver College.

Bingo! In the five years since I took voluntary early retirement from the Beaver faculty, I have been haunted by the slander that I was canned. Finally, it was out in the open. (One of the nicer things about Rottenberg is his upfrontness.) I'll say more, in a coda, about the post-graduate course I've received in character assassination, and about the meanness and pettiness of academics ill-equipped to deal with my contempt for them.

But first, straight thoughts about sexual politics and the politics of sexuality. I have always despised Teddy Kennedy since Chappaquiddick--not because of his dalliance with Mary Jo Kopechne, but because he abandoned her to drown to cover his own bare and cowardly ass. And I didn't much like either the fact that, as a Harvard undergrad, he had someone else write a Spanish term paper for him. Every way you look at Teddy, he's the weak loser in a family of high-powered achievers. I wouldn't like to be Teddy either, with the burden that Papa Joe laid on him and his siblings. And I certainly wouldn't want him to be president. (I'm not even confident about his being Senator from Massachusetts and, alas, titular leader of liberalism in America: What a sad gloss on the state of that ideology that he should be the best champion we can put forward.)

But it's not Kennedy's womanizing that bothers me. If we can learn to live with every other kind of deviant sexual minority (and I think we should), I can deal with womanizing in the president of the U.S. as well as the president of Drexel U. Id's Kay doesn't bother me a bit; nor does FDR's Lucy, either; nor does Eleanor's probably platonic lesbianism bother me a whit. Bless them all. Different strokes for different folks.

JFK's sharing a doxey with a Mafia mobster does make me nervous. Not the sex, but the riskiness of political entrapment. It's what happens in the Oval Office, not what transpires (or doesn't) in the Lincoln Bedroom, that is my concern as a patriotic citizen.

Hart's heartthrobs bother me less than his name change, his age change, his cosmetizing himself. I'm saddened by his leaving the race because of his ideas. We badly need them (much more than we need Pulitzer-poking journalists papparazzing in the dark.) In the sidebar stories on Hartlessness, I learn that Washington Post reporters who had attended a coke party declined to report that story. How many journalists do you know whose private sex lives would boost circulation in their own sheets? Between-the-sheets journalism should work both ways.

But I'm wandering.

I too believe in character and the presidency. That's why I was appalled to learn in Gary Wills' brilliant parable, Reagan's America: Innocents at Home, that the superclean Boy Scout Ronald Reagan was an FBI informer against his own union members when he was president of the Screen Actors Guild. And he was the key to MCA's getting the guild to waive its ruling that agents couldn't produce TV; his payoff was his own telesinecure as GE's "Progress is our most important product" shill.

(I was amused to read that when the Kennedy Justice Department started to investigate this patent violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, GE dropped RR like the hot potato he most certainly would have been had the investigation centered on him--as it most certainly would have, given his conflict of interest as SAG prexy.)

Indeed, it was this release that freed Reagan to become governor of California. When I look at Ronald Reagan I see almost no character at all, a failed move actor with a good gift for one-liners. Honi soit qui mal y pense. Where are all our hotshot journalists when daylight truths about RR keep being eclipsed by rat pack media?

As for Drexel's harpies, I find instructive Dinesh D'Souza's review (Wall Street Journal, May 6) of Andrea Dworkin's new polemic, Intercourse (Free Press, $19.95): "In Intercourse, Ms. Dworkin unveils a systematic patriarchal plot. Not only have men constructed a heterosexual framework to enforce the physical and psychological submission of women, but they have even figured out how to make women happily collude with them in this process. If women are ever to achieve freedom and equality, according to Ms. Dworkin, they cannot let them continue. They must wake up--or at least say they have a headache and go to sleep."

What looney-tune hyperfeminist balderdash! At least the Greek playwright Aristophanes had his women cut off their men's sex in the noble cause of ensuring peace. These bitter-enders want to stop making love altogether.

As I read the press reports of the Drexel prexy's problems, I smell the foul odor of sexual vindictiveness. I mean, he did apologize. Are we looking for some pass-free utopia? This neopuritan nonsense reeks of sore losers. They probably think H.L. Mencken's regimen of winking at an ugly girl once a day is exploitative. Their character is ugly when they spout such nutty Dworkinisms.

As for my coda. Newsroom scuttlebutt about my being canned at Beaver probably killed my journalistic opportunities. (One of the reasons I was willing to risk early retirement in 1982 was getting regularly published in the Bulletin, Inquirer and Daily News from 1977 onward; I projected that with a small pension and that kind of free-lancing, I'd do all right. But when I returned from my four wanderjahren in San Francisco, my overtures to resume contributing were met with bedroom laughs, silly titters and stonewalls. No matter; like Sinatra, I'm willing to do it my way, even though it's not as easy as I had imagined.)

Why would a full professor walk away from tenure is a question a lot of treadmillers couldn't begin to comprehend. My decision to take early retirement began on December 10th, 1980, when the English department in toto boycotted the Emily Dickinson sesquicentennial celebrations. When the puzzled students asked me why, I told them to read her poem which begins, "Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne'er succeed!"

Pettiness is the gravest failing in our egalitarian culture. It's the dark underbelly of envy. I am also the only Beaver professor to be denied emeritus status in the entire history of the college, even though probably half of the humanities library were my voluntary donations. That's O.K. too. I admit to being an ornery son of a bitch, and I told the dean--now president--that the contumely of fools is a kind of praise. I also told her that if I ever found out who was spreading the slanders about my tenure at Beaver, I'd sue them, not for the money, but to show them what a constitutional democracy is and how they have disgraced themselves by their petty, mean behavior.

And, Dan, I didn't "mess around" with those students. At least two relationships over my 20 years there were the deepest and most instructive connections I've ever had with any human being, male or female. What I most resent about the faculty backbiting has been its estrangement of those students from me.

As for what I learned over the years about the perils of two Catholic virgins marrying, and how impotent homosexuals express their sexual envy in gossip as a surrogate for true love, and how some ugly (by generally accepted community standards) women compensate for their lack of loveliness by power-tripping, that will have to wait on the novel I am writing--to protect the guilty.

from Welcomat, Philadelphia, Vol. XVI, No. 44, M May 20-26, 1987