Truths In The Ruins

By LANCE MORROW

America is still too young to have convincing ruins. Instead of admiring the tumbled stones of their former civilizations, Americans can only return to their memorable fiascoes, where they can weep and think of Ozymandias, king of kings. They can revisit Watergate and Vietnam, for example, or penetrate to the remoter pageants of McCarthyism or the stock-market crash of 1929. Poking around in the remnants of disaster can tell you where you have been and what you have been capable of.

Americans in the future may enjoy replaying the fiasco of the Thomas confirmation hearings: primal, defining national theater. The drama had layers -- legal, political, cultural, racial, ethical, sexual. The hearings were a bad moment for middle-aged white men. The Senate Judiciary Committee sat arrayed in its Caucasian glory, like Muppets of Bomfog and Claghorn, each Senator more confused and senescent and miserable and lost to pomposity than the last -- a row of flushed egos that said goodbye to dignity and intelligence sometime during the Eisenhower years.

But in this drama the elected Senators did not represent America. Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill did. The soap opera that brought them together was as sleazy, corrupt and stupid as much of the nation's life has become. But the business touched deep matters. It was about man and woman, about sex and power, about ambition and desire. The hearings, almost a new art form, commingled private tragedy, public farce, office mini-series, and ideological bonfire.

The most terrible of the American ruins is slavery, folly of follies. It has left its living cinders all over the geographical and moral landscape: in the South Bronx and South Side Chicago, in bigoted hearts and in the despairs and self-contempt of those left in the ruins.

The importance of the Thomas hearings may have been more in the area of race than that of sex. The issue of sexual harassment came to no resolution there, so the aftermath on that score remains full of glaring anger. But the Thomas proceedings had an unexpected cleansing power where race is concerned. The antagonists were black. The drama was universal. The crime of racism is to deny the humanity of people with skin of a different color. Tolerance arises from a recognition of oneself in others, from seeing in a separate being all one's own possibilities, weaknesses, appetites, loves, lapses, brutalities, decencies. The leading players in the Thomas drama, and many in the supporting cast, were accomplished, gifted, attractive, ambitious, complicated Americans -- and in this case, incidentally, African Americans. The hearings called forth a procession of people diverse and successful in ways not normally visible to white America.

No stereotypes this time. No Cosby, Oprah, Willie Horton, Michael Jackson, Michael Jordan, Jesse Jackson. The black nominee was a conservative, not a predictable character with a predictable party line. What's this? Blacks are different from one another? Think different thoughts? Men and women, of whatever race, could not begin to search for the truth in the case without looking into themselves.

Mystery hates the relentless predictabilities of dogma. It was a mystery that was on display before the Senate Judiciary Committee. That part of the truth was available to anyone whose mind was not lost in dense preconceptions. Politics and ideology have their organizational uses but are in general the enemies of deeper human truth. According to the polls, Americans around the country did not subscribe to the ideological conclusion to which so many in the women's movement leaped -- the appalling syllogism that: 1) sexual harassment is horrible and widespread (it has happened to me and to many I know); 2) Anita Hill (and only Hill, but that's enough because that's the way harassment happens) says he did it; therefore 3) Clarence Thomas is guilty as charged (without trial), should be kept off the Supreme Court, and bears the monstrous guilt of all men everywhere, so now that he is on the court all his future decisions, including any possible opinions on Roe v. Wade, are illegitimate, the product of his sick mind. And by extension, all future decisions of this conservative Supreme Court affecting women are contaminated by what Anita Hill claims to have happened years ago between a man and a woman in an office -- words about pubic hair on a Coke can and about a porn star with a large member. Ideology bludgeons the novelistic truth of character into its own preconceptions.

Something is missing here, something we will never know. But frothing ideology will not tell us: if Clarence Thomas is a conservative, that does not make him a sexual harasser. What he may or may not decide about Roe v. Wade has no bearing upon what Anita Hill claims about his conduct. Sometimes men sexually harass vulnerable women. Women may have predatory agendas too. Not all women are innocent, vulnerable victims. And sometimes men are monsters. Reality is rich and impish and asymmetrical. It laughs at manifestos.

After Clarence Thomas finished the first round of confirmation hearings, I would have voted against him on the grounds that he simply did not know enough -- too strange and green, I thought, too many vectors in his character firing off in different directions. I could see a black nationalist inside him fighting it out with a Reaganite. But last week I would have taken a chance and voted in his favor. His life is beginning now. It belongs entirely to him, I surmise, for the first time. He will not be the Justice that ideologues of either side have predicted. He will surprise them all.