A Frosty Reception

In David Lodge’s comic novel Changing Places, a British professor from the fictitious University of Rummidge takes over an American’s post at Euphoric State—UC Berkeley, of course—and vice versa. The Brit is briefly caught up in the tumult of countercultural revolution, and there is a priceless episode in which some hippies invite the wrath of the Man by taking over a vacant lot to create a “community garden,” that is, a public nuisance where the great unwashed and uninhibited can indulge in their particular species of horticulture. This episode is told primarily through newspaper clippings, the best of which is “An Eight-Year-Old’s View of the Crisis.” It’s a characteristically hilarious bit of ventriloquism on Lodge’s part, and what a little dummy he gives us:

I didn’t get to see the People’s Garden really, but I could feel that it was beautiful. In the Garden it was made of people’s feelings, not just their hands, they made it with their heart, who knew if they made it to stay, there are hundreds of people that built that garden, so we’ll never know if they meant it to stay.

The police are just ruining their lives by being police, they’re also keeping themselves from being a person. They act like they are some kind of nervous creatures.

— Submitted by Plotinus schoolteacher to Euphoric State Daily

If you find this sort of thing funny, chances are you can understand at least on some level the impulse that prompted conservative pundits like Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, and Mark Steyn to lash out at the Democrats for the “poster child abuse” of Graeme Frost, their spokesboy for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Conservatives, particularly those in the Waugh or Amis vein, are likely to be skeptical not only of emotional appeals but also of the idea that wisdom, at least of the practical kind, ever really comes from the mouths of babes. It’s impossible, for instance, to imagine a pundit like Steyn praising the poetry of Matty Stepanek, but when Jimmy Carter gave Stepanek’s eulogy, he said, “We have known kings and queens, and we’ve known presidents and prime ministers, but the most extraordinary person whom I have ever known in my life is Mattie Stepanek. His life philosophy was ‘Remember to play after every storm!’ and his motto was ‘Think Gently, Speak Gently, Live Gently.’”

Is there any harm in celebrating such Oprah-ready sentiments? Probably not. You’re either stirred by them or you’re not, and I doubt that one can change camps, that a Mark Steyn can ever become a Jimmy Carter. Nevertheless, I think the attack by Steyn and others on the Democrats’ use of Graeme Frost was tasteless, not to mention supremely self-defeating. As readers probably know by now, most of the blogosphere’s criticisms hinged on whether Frost’s family was really poor enough to deserve free or subsidized health care: The kids were in private school, for God’s sake! It turned out that the children were on scholarship. Other accusations were met with similarly reasonable explanations.

But suppose those intrepid bloggers had discovered that Graeme Frost was a paid actor, and not a sick little boy? Would it have changed the fact that there are sick children out there who could benefit from subsidized health care? No, but it would have underscored the tediously obvious fact that much of political persuasion relies on theatrics and appeals to the heart over the head. It’s unclear what value there is in harping on this point. People call themselves bleeding-heart liberals not because they’re unaware that they let their emotions master them, but because they’re proud of it.

The sick thing in this case, however, is that Graeme Frost seems not to have been put in the spotlight to persuade conservatives. (What savvy politician would see any use in so transparent a strategy? Did it work with the “Crying Indian” or the “Daisy Girl”?) On the contrary, he was like an irresistible crack rock dangled in front of commentators addicted to shameless drive-time provocation. To borrow a line from Theodore Dalrymple, they are like a “little girl riding her bicycle with her hands outspread, saying, ‘Look at me, mummy,’ in the knowledge that her mother will be appalled and terrified, and will probably scream.” It’s amazing that Ann Coulter hasn’t exhausted everyone’s patience for this sort of thing, but still it persists. So what might have been an occasion to discuss the importance of emotions in politics has just turned into a way for Democrats to perpetuate the rumor that conservatives haven’t got any emotions.

It’s tough, but evidently not impossible, to shoot the messenger and shoot yourself in the foot with just one bullet. And lest conservatives think that these shabby appeals to emotion are strictly a left-wing affair,  I can remind them of at least one sick person they kept the spotlight on in much the same fashion.