The Breakfast Table

Table Scraps

Dear David:

Odds and Ends.

1. My favorite columnists. I don’t divide them liberal-conservative; some liberals I find boring, some conservatives I find tedious; and some people are great to read even if you never agree with them. I like Safire as much as anyone, and usually read him first. I never miss Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, or Tom Friedman, because I’m interested in what they’re into. I read Gigot and Hunt, and the Wall Street Journal editorials.

Sometimes I get mad at Safire’s columns, but I don’t hate him. I have gotten lots of wonderful mail responding to our back-and-forth, and I know you have too. But, I have just deleted a half dozen hate mails from my box, from people I don’t know, who obviously disagree with me, but that isn’t the point. Something is very wrong with the tenor of debate and discourse in this country, from the fact that people send vicious hate mail to columnists they disagree with–attacking the person, not the ideas–to the fact that 10 percent of school kids brought a weapon to school at least once in the last year.

NPR had a long piece on the new studies of incivility in the workplace, which at first sounds like another ad for the Trial Lawyers, but in fact turns out to be a pretty troubling phenomenon. Good manners at work are gone. It is isn’t just the baby moguls in Hollywood who yell when they don’t get what they want. People scream at each other. Congressmen get yelled at, taunted, vilified even, when they come home. I remember growing up thinking that you treated Congressmen with respect…respect differences, not assault them. Turns out something like 20% of all workers intentionally slow down their productivity to get even with those who mistreat them, which means it’s bad for business. In policing, Wilson and Kelling proved years ago that incivility breeds disorder breeds violence. The famous experiment was that if you leave an abandoned car in a neighborhood, it may last a while without being attacked, but once it is vandalized at all, it will be destroyed within hours. Permission to behave badly breeds bad behavior. I think it’s true in our relations with each other. How do we teach our kids manners if we show none. I taped a PBS show at Stanford yesterday, and before we began, the host said: “Now this is television manners, which means we interrupt each other and yell…

2. But are we politically correct, or what? Consider the following item in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, and make of it what you will: Page A3.

“For the Record: Affirmative action plan–A headline in Wednesday’s Times said the Clinton administration has decided on a ‘new approach to job preferences.’ As the story stated, the plan would give preferences to minority businesses for some federal contracts.”

My guess? If you call things preferences, people are against them. So whoever is leading this particular losing battle got mad that the Times, called the new Clinton preference program a preference program, which it is, instead of an affirmative action program. So the Times responded….

Will this ever end? Or maybe better still, will it ever move forward? I’m not at all sure the Administration will convince the Court that a showing of statistical imbalance between market share and share of government contracts automatically justifies a preference amounting to 10% of the bid. Worse, it seems to me that the recent experience in California and Texas makes clear that if your goal is to ensure that the power of government is used to promote diversity and help the disadvantaged, that there are other ways of doing it. I can’t imagine that the Justices could have any problem with preferring companies that employ welfare mothers, sponsor local schools, provide summer jobs to disadvantaged teenagers and are responsible citizens of the community, regardless of the color of the skin of the principal in the firm.

Back to court. Good news for the lawyers.

3. Speaking of the Court, the weirdest aspect of yesterday’s opinions is the fact that the conclusion that HIV infection is a disability regardless of symptoms, etc. was based entirely on its impact on reproduction. Now as a professor of gender discrimination, I can’t tell you how strange this is. Justice Kennedy himself, who wrote the opinion, recognized this, saying they were stuck with that posture because that was how the case was decided below. But note: is pregnancy a disability, or is the inability to get pregnant the disability? If infertility is a disability, why don’t insurance companies cover it? (As I learned, you’re supposed to lie and they will, but if like me, you decide you should be able to tell the truth, you pay yourself … I don’t care, it worked, I would’ve paid anything, but that is the point) Whatever happened to the days when we were fighting against the notion that a woman’s existence is totally defined by reproduction? Odd that an approach that would have been pure instinct in the fifties is so loaded now. If they cover Viagra, why not infertility?

Best Viagra joke:

What do Viagra and Disneyland have in common? Sixty minute wait for a two-minute ride.

4. Movie critics. Janet Maslin in the New York Times says Dr. Doolittle is delightful. Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times says it is a disgrace. Did you see the Beck kills the critics story in the New Yorker a while back; he comes back, and secretly begins killing all the critics who, over the years, have said mean things about him…..

5. China-watch. So far, it seems, one person is in prison because of Sam Donaldson–a guy he was supposed to interview was locked up two hours after the interview was cancelled, Sam had a great story, the Chinese must not understand about Sam, he denounced China as a “police state;” I’ve never seen him better; it’s Sam versus Geraldo as far as I can see; Geraldo has been doing a great job of defending Clinton while everyone else on that plane has been attacking him; my guess