Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) (3 page)

But even when I had strong opinions and left my children out of them, there were those who thought they were inevitably connected with my sex, and perhaps they were right. There was the reader who hated my pacifist columns in opposition to the Gulf war. “If you were a real man,” he wrote, “you’d understand why we need to be there.” On the other hand, being a real woman
was invaluable in certain situations. During the Anita Hill hearings, charges of sexual harassment in high places and the gender blindness of the United States Senate cried out not for a purely intellectual response but for righteous indignation as well, and for a feminist perspective. It seems to me that a dry intellectual discussion of a rape case on my part not only would be boring but would be, in some clear sense, a lie. There are issues about which I not only think but also feel. And yet standard operating procedure has been to bring the mind but not the heart to the table of public discourse. I had to wonder why. Is thought always more telling than emotion? Is the territory of the heart always secondary to that of the mind?

Or is it possible that we devalue certain ways of looking at the world because we have come to believe, for whatever reason, that those ways are the purview of women?

And what would it mean if six women brought a lawsuit against their newspaper for equality, and one of the visible results of that lawsuit was a woman doing a bad imitation of a man twice a week on the Op-Ed page?

When I was a girl my admiration for Dorothy Thompson had something to do with the fact that she wrote her column in bed, drinking black coffee, and dictating to a secretary. But when I reread her columns as a grown woman far less enamored of working in a supine position, what struck me was her willingness to write about the Third Reich one day and her nasturtiums the next. There is no contradiction between her power, her influence, her hreadth of knowledge and interest, and her contention that she was “altogether female.” Clearly she had settled the issue of emotion vs. intellect within her own mind. Of a collection of her columns entitled
Let the Record Speak
, one reviewer wrote, “Dorothy Thompson writes fierily. Sometimes she seems to write almost hysterically.… She gets mad. She pleads; she denounces. And the result is that where the intellectualized columns of her colleagues fade when pressed between the leaves of a book, these columns still ring.”

In a speech in 1939 she said:

“One cannot exist today as a person—one cannot exist in full consciousness—without having to have a showdown with one’s self, without having to define what it is that one lives by, without being clear in one’s own mind what matters and what does not matter.” They were words of clear guidance for me from a more experienced woman when I began to write the Op-Ed column we named “Public & Private.”

Now, three years later, the words that speak loudest to me are much simpler, less lofty, perhaps, in their bread-and-butter tone, more stereotypically “altogether female.” In a letter Dorthy Thompson’s son received after her death in 1961, the last sentence was “As I write this little note, I feel very grateful.” Me, too: for all the women who laid the groundwork. These are my words; this is their world, a world in which we can wear our gender on our sleeves, unabashedly, as we go about the business of thinking out loud.

UNSOLICITED OPINIONS

A
t a dinner mourning his retirment, Tom Wicker, who had been a columnist at the
Times
for a quarter century, read a letter he’d received that day from a reader: “1992 is shaping up to be a good year. First we got rid of Gorbachev and now we’re getting rid of you.”

We laugh at the mail from readers that suggests that we are mistaken, ill informed, or are just plain idiots. And yet I find it inescapable, and telling, too, that the letters I receive from readers that are strongest in every way—powerfully moving as well as horribly insulting—are the ones that come as the result of columns about those issues I’ve embraced most passionately.

It has always seemed to me that this bully
pulpit should devote itself, in large part, to those who have no pulpit at all, to the publicly disfranchised. While I care about the affairs of the White House, Congress, and the world community, there are many more people to speak for and about them than there are to speak for the powerless, whether it be the homeless, the poor, the gay men and lesbians, African-Americans, the terminally ill, or people with AIDS. I have chosen often to write about those people and their problems. And the response has often been discouraging.

I don’t mean that all the mail is brickbats. I remember the day my assistant called to say, “You got a fan letter from Paul Simon!” It was only later that I realized I didn’t know whether it was the singer or the senator. (It was the senator.) When I won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, I was often asked what the best thing about it was. The honest answer is that everything about winning the Pulitzer is great. But the thing I found most cheering was the mail from perfect strangers (emphasis on the adjective) who took time out to say: Congratulations. We are pleased and proud. I kept all those letters, and when I’m getting clobbered pretty badly I’ll read one or two.

Because part of this job is getting clobbered with some regularity. In my case, the columns that generate the most mail tend to be the ones about those social-welfare issues that move me most powerfully. The response to those issues never ceases to amaze me: the meanness, the vitriol, the Old Testament verses, the Ku Klux Klan literature. With the exception of abortion, I receive no mail on any issue that is as horrid and ignorant as the mail I get on gay rights. (While I have received a fair number of passionate, intelligent, deeply thoughtful letters about why abortion is wrong, I have yet to receive such a letter about homosexuality.) I will never understand people who think that the way to show their righteous opposition to sexual freedom is to write letters full of filthy words. Nor do I understand people like the man who thought the way to show us what he thought of the idea of gay people serving in the military was to send a box of dead roaches. And by first-class mail, too.

But the flip side of all this comes when you give voice to people who feel rendered mute by the great world. They are grateful out of all proportion to the simple act.

I was prepared to be reviled for suggesting that gay Irish should be given a place in the St. Patrick’s Day parade, and I was. (“It’s a good thing her grandfather’s already dead,” one caller said the day the column appeared, “or she would have killed him for sure this morning.”) But I was not prepared for the letters of gratitude from so many gay people. I was prepared for negative mail about an affirmative action column. But I was not prepared for all the mail from African-Americans who said, “Thank you for speaking our truth.”

I was unprepared for the reaction we got when I wrote about the press itself, about how and why we do what we do. Clearly the readers believed we never considered such things, when in fact it sometimes seems that considering them is most of what we do. This was particularly true of what became, for a while, my best-known column, a piece criticizing
The New York Times
for its coverage of the woman who had accused William Kennedy Smith of raping her in Palm Beach. (Mr. Smith, of course, was later acquitted of those charges and the woman, Patricia Bowman, went public to insist that what she had said was true. But before and during the trial the question of using her name was of great moment.) I made the mistake of going on vacation soon after that column, and several readers called to ask whether I had been fired. One right-wing zealot thought that after months of championing welfare cheats, boozy vagrants, and perverts I had finally gotten my just deserts. “Quindlen,” he wrote with glee, like Tom Wicker’s New Year’s correspondent, “you are out of there!”

We laugh about the mail. But some of it still stings me—until I recall the balm. When you write about the parents of gay people and a young man writes to say that he used the column as a way of coming out to his mother and father—well, you can get by on something like that for a long, long time.

THE OLD BLOCK
May 17, 1992

The block on which my father grew up half a century ago is a truncated little street that leads nowhere. If it were a foot or two narrower, the map makers might have called it an alley. The houses are identical two-story attached brick buildings with bay windows on the top floor, an overobvious attempt at grandeur.

In this quiet backwater in the southwestern part of the city the children of Irish-Catholic families played in the late afternoons after they had changed from their parochial school uniforms. A police officer walked by twice a day, talking to the people he knew so well.

My father remembers that in one fifteen-minute span when he was eight years old he was hit by four people to whom he was not related: the cop; the neighbor whose window he drew upon with spit; the priest who saw him messing with a statue, and the nun who saw the priest whack him and wanted to second the emotion. So he grew.

Today the kids on the block are black. The house where the
seven Quindlen children were raised, the boys packed two to a bed, has long been empty. The small setback porch is still covered with debris from the fire that gutted the building several years ago. There is plywood nailed over the glassless windows and the doorless doorway.

This was a prosperous neighborhood, a way station to something better. Today it is a poor one, a dead end. Charred interiors are common. So are crime, drugs, and a sense of going nowhere.

Since L.A. burst into flames we have cast a net of blame in our search for those who abandoned America’s cities.

The answer is simple. We did. Over my lifetime prosperity in America has been measured in moving vans, backyards and the self-congratulatory remark “I can’t remember the last time I went to the city.” America became a circle of suburbs surrounding an increasingly grim urban core.

In the beginning there was a synergy between the two; we took the train to the city to work and shop, then fled as the sun went down. But by the 1970s we no longer needed to shop there because of the malls. And by the 1980s we no longer had to work there because of the now-you-see-it rise of industrial parks and office complexes. Pseudo-cities grew up, built of chrome, glass, and homogeneity. Half of America now lives in the ’burbs.

We abandoned America’s cities.

Ronald Reagan and George Bush did, too, and so did many Democrats, truth be told. And they’re going to
have to an
te up now. But it’s not enough anymore to let those boys take all the responsibility. They don’t carry it well enough.

I understand how Eugene Lang felt when he gave a speech at his old grade school and, overwhelmed by the emptiness of words, offered all the students in the class a chance to go to college. I’ve heard the argument that Mr. Lang’s largesse takes government off the hook. But I bet it’s not compelling for kids who might have gone down the drain if one man hadn’t remembered where he came from, before he moved on to someplace greener, richer, better.

Over the years I’ve heard about sister-city programs between places here and places abroad, places like Minsk or Vienna. Pen pals. Cultural exchange. Volunteer philanthropy. And all the while, twenty minutes away from the suburbs are cultures and lives and problems about which we are shamefully ignorant. I like the sister-city concept. Short Hills and Newark. South-central L.A. and Simi Valley. Both sides benefit.