PARTING SHOT

Listening to the ubiquitous and sappy Shirley MacLaine being interviewed on National Public Radio, I resisted the urge to laugh. For a moment. The actress-guru, who claims to have had numerous past lives and insists on writing books about them, is just one example of the old saying (never used by Joe Biden, to my knowledge) that you can never go wrong by underestimating people’s taste. The best that can be said of MacLaine and her ilk is that they encourage their followers to use their imaginations. Is it really so bad if people stuck in dull lives want to believe they were courtesans in the time of Louis XIV or heroes at the Battle of Hastings? MacLaine is at work on a new movie-well, not exactly new, since she says she’s already seen the movie in another life. (Take that, Siskel and Ebert.) Of course there’s a lesson to be learned from all this persona-hopping: “Do it the best you can or you’ll have to come back and do it over.” Eighth-grade math, here I come.

MacLaine and her fellow New Agers always stress the cosmic interconnectedness of everything and everybody. Not too original (but then, how could anything be original if it’s all happened before?) and easy to lampoon, but it does strike you sometimes that there may be something to it.; Look, for instance, at the number of issues in the past month or so that have to do with character, whether of individuals or institutions. Is character something we can change, chameleon-like, or a kind of straitjacket we’re fitted for at an early age and can never alter?

Take Joe Biden, for instarce. Here is a man obviously much over his head in national politics-a genial, good-natured dim bulb who wanted to move dp the ladder. Sensing his deficiencies, he tried to polish up his credentials and his rhetoric. He got caught ripping off speeches! from better minds and gilding his law school record. Sad, but hardly surprising. All over America, very ordinary folks strive to be president of Acme Widgets or Grand Salamander of their lodge. Biden might have looked no further than the current inhabitant of the White House to see that American politics is no meritocracy. If Reagan can do it. . .

Football, however, is a meritocracy. You don’t have to be nice or sycophantic or know the right people to start in the NFL; you just have to be very, very good. When a wide receiver and a cornerback sprint downfield, then leap for a crucial pass, no hype or Wheaties ads or publicists car) do a thing to help them. The ability is there or it’s not, and the cold, clear distinction between the pretty good and the truly great cannot be fudged on the gridiron as it often is in everyday life. But when our heroes come off the field and start grousing about raises and pension plans, something is jarringly wrong. The difference between a Doug Cosbie|and a Randy White, money aside, is this: White knows the limits of his character. He knows that in certain areas of life he is suprejme; in others he’s a klutz. Cosbie, on the] other hand, thinks he can double as Samuel Gompers in a Polo shirt. Of course simple envy is behind much of the fans’ resentment of the players, but there’s more: when the players become labor negotiators or picketing idealists, they desert the mythical realm where we know they belong. Adults can admire and children worship a player who fights for tough yardage, gets hammered, and bounces right up, but when the guy starts talking equity and lawyer-agent talk, we see him as all too human. Football is one of the civic religions of America, and the players who serve as high priests have taken their vows-not of poverty and chastity, granted but of obedience to an ideal. The players have to choose who they want to be Gods can’t gripe about paychecks.

Speaking of religion, the pope on his recent visit brought not peace but a sword, His unambiguous message-no clerical dissent, no female priests, no birth control-was straight out of the fifteenth century, a bitter pill for most democratic, egalitarian Americans. What is curious, at least to this unchurched pagan, is the clamor raised by so many “Catholics” who would force the church to stop being the church in order to accommodate modern, liberal ideas. I’d love to do the triathlon, but can we hold the swimming and maybe just jog a mile or so? The whole point of the Catholic Church is that it stands athwart the modern drive toward a one-person, one-vote world. But as a people we love to have it all, and we flee from hard choices. Can’t decide on unpopular budget cuts? Sharpen up the Gramm-Rudman ax and mindlessly let it fall. Can’t live with the pope’s medieval strictures? Force the church to become a branch of the Democratic Party. The solution would seem to be arrivederci, Papa or its Polish equivalent, for those who feel they belong in the twentieth century.

Someone else forced into a sea change of character was Judge Robert Bork (prediction, October 2: rejected, 53-47). Even had Bork been confirmed, the Reagan administration would have lost big, at least in the short run. Knowing they couldn’t sell him as what he is, the Reaganauts were forced to put Bork across as a mealy-mouthed moderate. If Justice Bork would be a good stare decisis man and leave those nasty liberal precedents in place, why would Reagan want to nominate him? But the administration couldn’t let Bork be Bork because he had already been Bork too much in twenty years of writing, speaking, and judging. So a New Bork was trotted out to spend days claiming that he never meant, when he was denouncing Supreme Court rulings as wicked and irresponsible, to imply that they were wicked and irresponsible.

One more note on character: this corpseis getting cold, but notice how Gail(Passages) Sheehy has become the officialguide to The Meaning of Gary Hart. IfMacLaine sees character as pantyhose, atemporary garment, Sheehy, in her “Road toBimini” article, gives us character as strait-jacket. Hart, we are told, was corseted andshaped by his ascetic Nazarene upbringingand thus became a corked bottle of ego andhormones just waiting to pop. The problemwith Sheehy’s diagnosis-and with behavioral psychology and all theories that sayenvironment is destiny-is that it crowdsfree will out of the picture. If Hart was blindly following an emotional blueprint drawnup by his parents and his church, it makes little sense to blame him for what happened.Guilt and innocence only exist where thereis choice. We may put away a rabid dog, butno one suggests that the dog is guilty orwrong or “used bad judgment.” We don’thave to vote for Hart-he’s forfeited thatprivilege-but let’s not deny him the dignity of free, if stupid, choice.