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Back in the fall of 1992, when George Bush and Danforth Quayle were running the most inept campaign since John Henry Olshaw ran for the Colorado Third District congressional seat in 1978 on a platform that called for legalized skinny-dipping, all you had to do to get a laugh from an audience was say two words: Family Values.
Most of us are quite capable of handling our own family values without any help from Washington (a city which boasts high rates of bastardy and divorce), and the election returns showed what a stupid campaign theme that was.
But some people never learn, and in this election year, the phrase keeps emerging, usually from Republican mouths. Curious as to why this nuisance persists, I called my favorite inside source, one Ananias Ziegler, media relations director for the Committee That Really Runs America.
With all the real issues around, why do some
Republicans keep harping about Family Values?
I
asked.
What real issues? O.J. Simpson? Prince Charles? The
World Cup? Possible baseball strike?
Those aren't real issues,
I argued.
That's all I see on TV or read in the paper,
he
countered. What did you have in mind?
Things like health-care reform, over-intrusive
government, unfunded mandates, a judicial system where
money means everything.
Ziegler laughed. Quit being such an idealist. Back to
Family Values. You've got to understand how the Republican
party has operated for the past 50 years. The idea is to
fabricate an issue that scares people to death, and then
hammer it home that the only cure for this dreadful problem
is to elect a Republican, who will then ignore it.
You mean like Willie Horton in '88?
It goes back a lot farther than that. The Chicoms
were poised to invade Quemoy, Matsu, Honolulu and San
Francisco unless we elected some folks who weren't soft on
Communism. The Red Army would roll through the Fulda Gap,
that sort of thing.
That's history,
I noted. What about
today?
That's where Family Values come in. A lot of people
are apparently worried that militant homosexuals will
enlist in the army or that radical feminists will burn
their churches, stuff like that. But it would be rather
rude to just get up and say that in public. So you announce
that you're for Family Values, and people know you stand
four-square against these threats.
And you haven't come up with any better way to say
this than 'Family Values'?
I wondered.
We're working on it,
Ziegler said, but it's
tough. We've tried 'pro-family' and 'traditional values,'
and we'll continue. One problem is that Republicans
continue to admire Ronald Reagan -- our first divorced
president, and his daughter just bared herself for Playboy.
It's hard to be both a Reaganite and a Family Values
supporter. But the worst part is that someday it will dawn
on people that Family Values are pretty much opposed to
American tradition.
That was a shock, so I pressed for details.
Remember your schoolbooks, and how you were taught to
admire the frontiersman and the pioneer, those great
American heroes.
Of course I remembered the tales of Kit Carson and Daniel Boone and the Alamo.
Most of them didn't have families, or they were on
the outs with their kinfolk. That's why they went west. If
they had been practicing Family Values, they'd have gotten
married and stayed on some hardscrabble New England farm
among the Puritans. And let's not forget those stalwart
Yankee trappers who had a wife in every Indian
village.
American mythology does conflict with Family Values. So does our economic system, I learned.
Capitalism arose in medieval Europe,
Ziegler
explained. Now there were some Family Values in the Dark
Ages. Everybody went to church on Sunday because you'd get
burned at the stake if you didn't. Most folks were serfs,
tied to the land; you were stuck with your parents' lot in
life and there was no way to improve it. Capitalism and
free enterprise provided freedom and opportunity -- but it
disrupted families.
So most of America's ideals are rather antithetical to Family Values, I observed.
Precisely,
Ziegler said, and government
programs do hurt Family Values. Take the GI Bill. Get an
education, and you don't have to work on the family farm.
Buy a house, so you don't have to live with relatives. Or
look at big American corporations, transferring people so
they don't live near their kin.
So if America really exalted Family Values, this would be a backward, feudal society without multi-national corporations, fast-food chains and other major contributors to political campaigns.
Something like that,
Ziegler said. Do me a
favor.
I owed him, so I said I'd be glad to.
Whenever you hear someone say he's for Family Values,
don't ask him what he means, or what would happen if we
really had Family Values instead of capitalism.
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