Meanwhile, in India, the BJP-led government has contracted an acute case of snout-in-trough disease. The sting operation carried out by the excellent website tehelka.com—what a difference the Internet has made to press freedoms in India!—showed many of the country’s leaders accepting bribes on videotape. There have been some resignations, but no admissions of guilt, and much talk, by the shamed leaders and other governing party figures, of a sinister “conspiracy” against the ruling coalition. The new BJP president has spoken of creating a new code of conduct for people in public life, but at the same time has refused to expel his corruption-tainted predecessor. Apparently, and in spite of the video evidence, it wasn’t necessarily him.
And now, as the United States, the world’s greatest contributor to global warming, repudiates the Kyoto treaty designed to reduce environmentally harmful emissions, President George W. Bush goes so far as to claim that the link between greenhouse gases and global warming has not been proven. (“It wasn’t us.”) This is what the cigarette companies used to say about cancer, and it’s about as persuasive. But the president has a big megaphone, and if he goes on repeating his claims, he may even make them stick for a long, damaging time.
Just sometimes a song stumbles on a truth about the spirit of the age. The Shaggy-Rikrok hit is cheerfully unrepentant about its amoral little discovery. Deny your wrongs and you will right them. As Nancy Reagan might have put it, “Just say no.” It’s plainly an irresistible proposition. You hear it everywhere right now, hanging in the air like a mantra. All together now: “It wasn’t me . . .”
MAY 2001: ABORTION IN INDIA
I have always believed myself fortunate to have come from a sprawling Indian family dominated by women. I have no brothers but plenty of sisters (three: believe me, that’s plenty). My mother’s sisters are a pair of aunts as formidable and irresistible as Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia and Aunt Agatha. In my generation of cousins, girls outnumber boys by two to one. While I was growing up, the family’s houses, in India and Pakistan, were full of the instructions, quarrels, laughter, and ambitions of these women, few of whom resemble the stereotype of the demure, self-effacing Indian woman. These are opinionated, voluble, smart, funny, arm-waving persons—lawyers, educators, radicals, movers, shakers, matriarchs—and to be heard in their company you must not only raise your voice but also have something interesting to say. If you aren’t worth listening to, you will most certainly not be heard.
As a result, I feel, to this day, most at home in the company of women. Among my close friends the girls far outnumber the boys. In my writing, I have repeatedly sought to create female characters as rich and powerful as those I have known. The men in my books are rarely as flamboyant as the women. This is as it should be: or at least, in my experience, how it has been, more often than not.
It is therefore worrying, to say the least, that these women, or rather their potential successors in the Indian generation presently being conceived, are rapidly becoming an endangered species. In spite of the illegality of the practice—and under cover of spurious health checks—ultrasound tests to determine the gender of unborn children are increasingly being used all over India to identify, and then abort, obscene quantities of healthy female fetuses. The population is rapidly becoming lopsided, skewed toward male numerical dominance to a genuinely alarming degree.
Here’s a tough nut for the pro-choice lobby on abortion, of which I’ve always been a fully paid-up member. What should be done when a woman uses her power over her own body to discriminate against female fetuses? Many Indian commentators say that if these sex-discriminatory abortions are to end, the refusals must come from Indian women. But Indian women want male children as much as their husbands do. In part this is because of the myriad pressures of a male-centered society, including the expenses of the dowry system. But fundamentally it’s the result of modern technology being placed at the service of medieval social attitudes. Clearly not all Indian women are as emancipated as those among whom I was lucky enough to be raised. Traditional India still exists, and its values are still powerful. Women beware women: an old story, given a chilling new gynecological twist.
Ever since Indira and Sanjay Gandhi’s attempt to introduce birth control by diktat during the forced-vasectomy excesses of the mid-seventies, it has been very hard to get the Indian masses to accept the idea of family planning. Mother Teresa’s hard-line attack on contraception didn’t help. Lately, Hindu nationalists have made things even harder by suggesting that the country’s Muslims are breeding faster than Hindus, thus placing Hinduism “under threat.” (This, even though the Hindu majority makes up a whopping 85 percent of the population.)
Abortion, along with contraception, has up to now been anathematized by Indian religious leaders. As a result India’s population has soared past the one billion mark, and is projected to overtake China’s within a decade or so. But now, suddenly, terminations of pregnancies have become acceptable to many Indians, for the most reprehensible of reasons; and the argument over the urgent issues of population control gets even murkier. There are those who claim that the new wave of abortions is actually beneficial, because the bias toward boys means that Indian couples who have girl children will tend to go on having daughters until they have a son, thus contributing to overpopulation. Allowing them to make the choice, the argument continues, will not result in a scarcity of girl children but rather make sure there isn’t a glut of them. The trouble with this theory is that the statistical evidence suggests that in a generation’s time there will indeed be a girl shortage. Then what? Will girls become more valued than they are today, or will the masculinism of Indian society, reinforced by the weight of numbers, simply create more and more macho men, and increasingly downtrodden women?
Not all problems are capable of instant solution. Even though the nation imagines itself as a woman—Bharat-Mata, Mother India—and even though, in Hinduism, the dynamic principle of the godhead—shakti—is female, the scandal of the missing girls of India will end only when and if modern India succeeds in overturning centuries of prejudice against girl children.
This doesn’t mean that nothing can be done. The government can and should crack down hard on the ultrasound clinics that are allowing people to defy the law. It should provide state benefits for families with girl children and perhaps even, for a time, impose tax penalties on families with boys. Politicians, educators, activist groups, even newspaper columnists can and should batter away at the ingrained prejudices that are at the heart of the trouble. In the end it all boils down to this: is today’s India prepared to be seen as the country that gets rid of its daughters because it believes them inferior to men? The parents who are doing this may one day face questions from the children they allowed to live. “Where are my sisters?” What will they answer then?
JUNE 2001: REALITY TV
I’ve managed to miss out on reality TV until now. In spite of all the talk in Britain about nasty Nick and flighty Mel or, in America, about the fat, naked bastard Richard manipulating his way to desert-island victory, I have somehow preserved my purity. I wouldn’t recognize Nick or Mel if I passed them in the street, or Richard if he were standing in front of me unclothed.
Ask me where the Big Brother house is, or how to reach Temptation Island, and I have no answer. I do remember the American Survivor contestant who managed to fry his own hand so that the skin peeled away until his fingers looked like burst sausages, but that’s because he got onto the main evening news. Otherwise, search me. Who won? Who lost? Who cares?
The subject of reality-TV shows, however, has been impossible to avoid. Their success is the media story of the (new) century, along with the ratings triumph of the big-money game shows like Millionaire. Success on this scale insists on being examined, because it tells us things about ourselves, or ought to.
And what tawdry narcissism is here revealed! The television set, once so idealistically thought of as our window on the world, has become a dime-store mirror instead. Who needs
images of the world’s rich otherness when you can watch these half-familiar avatars of yourself—these half-attractive half-persons—enacting ordinary life under weird conditions? Who needs talent when the unashamed self-display of the talentless is constantly on offer?
I’ve been watching [the British] Big Brother 2, which has achieved the improbable feat of taking over the tabloid front pages in the final stages of a general election campaign. This, according to the conventional wisdom, is because the show is more interesting than the election. The “reality” may be even stranger. It may be that Big Brother is so popular because it’s even more boring than the election. Because it is the most boring, and therefore most “normal,” way of becoming famous and, if you’re lucky or smart, of getting rich as well.
“Famous” and “rich” are now the two most important concepts in Western society, and ethical questions are simply obliterated by the potency of their appeal. To be famous and rich, it’s okay—it’s actually “good”—to be devious. It’s “good” to be exhibitionistic. It’s “good” to be bad. And what dulls the moral edge is boredom. It’s impossible to maintain a sense of outrage about people being so trivially self-serving for so long.
Oh, the dullness! Here are people becoming famous for being asleep, for keeping a fire alight, for letting a fire go out, for videotaping their clichéd thoughts, for flashing their breasts, for lounging around, for quarreling, for bitching, for being unpopular, and (this is too interesting to happen often) for kissing! Here, in short, are people becoming famous for doing nothing much at all, but doing it where everyone can see.
Add the contestants’ exhibitionism to the viewers’ voyeurism and you get a picture of a society sickly in thrall to what Saul Bellow called “event glamour.” Such is the glamour of these banal but brilliantly spotlit events that anything resembling a real value—modesty, decency, intelligence, humor, selflessness, you can write your own list—is rendered redundant. In this inverted ethical universe, worse is better. The show presents “reality” as a prizefight, and suggests that in life, as on TV, anything goes, and the more deliciously contemptible it is, the more we’ll like it. Winning isn’t everything, as Charlie Brown once said, but losing isn’t anything.
The problem with this kind of engineered realism is that, like all fads, it’s likely to have a short shelf-life, unless it finds ways of renewing itself. The probability is that our voyeurism will become more demanding. It won’t be enough to watch people being catty, or weeping when evicted from the house of hell, or “revealing everything” on subsequent talk shows, as if they had anything left to reveal.
What is gradually being reinvented is the gladiatorial combat. The TV set is the Colosseum, and the contestants are both gladiators and lions; their job is to eat one another until only one remains alive. But how long, in our jaded culture, before “real” lions, actual dangers, are introduced to these various forms of fantasy island, to feed our hunger for more action, more pain, more vicarious thrills? Here’s a thought, prompted by the news that the redoubtable Gore Vidal has agreed to witness the execution by lethal injection of the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. The witnesses at an execution watch the macabre proceedings through a glass window: a screen. This, too, is a kind of reality TV, and—to make a modest proposal—it may represent the future of such programs. If we are willing to watch people stab one another in the back, might we not also be willing actually to watch them die?
In the world outside TV, our numbed senses already require increasing doses of titillation. One murder is barely enough; only the mass murderers make the front pages. You have to blow up a building full of people or machine-gun a whole royal family to get our attention. Soon, perhaps, you’ll have to kill off a whole species of wildlife or unleash a virus that wipes out people by the thousands, or else you’ll be small potatoes. You’ll be on an inside page. And as in reality, so on “reality TV.” How long until the first TV death? How long until the second?
By the end of Orwell’s great novel 1984, Winston Smith has been brainwashed. “He loved Big Brother.” As, now, do we.
JULY 2001: THE RELEASE OF THE BULGER KILLERS
Like a character in a Greek tragedy, a woman—Denise Fergus is her momentarily famous name—figuratively holds up the dead body of her murdered child, James Bulger, and howls for justice. The murderers have been released from jail, and the mother finds that unjust. “No matter where they are,” she cries, “someone will be waiting. No stone will be left unturned.” Then, descending from such classic blood-must-have-blood heights, and rather giving her game away, she adds, “For eight years I have kept my dignity. In the near future I will tell my side of the story.” Let us hope that this doesn’t mean that eye-for-an-eye calls for “justice” will soon be splashed all over a tabloid near you. Dignity doesn’t rate the front page, after all. And if one or other of the released men is killed by vigilantes—or if innocent men, mistaken for the freed killers, are attacked by the same vigilantes—then so much the better for sales.
The case of the 1993 Merseyside murder of two-year-old James Bulger by the then ten-year-old Robert Thompson and Jon Venables raised big questions from the beginning. That the killers were themselves children, and that the killing was unusually brutal, made us ask ourselves about the nature of evil, a profound question inevitably rendered shallow by the media, for whom evil appeared to be some sort of videonasty manifestation of the “demon seed” variety. It was indeed suggested that Venables and Thompson had been influenced by a video nasty which, as it turned out, they hadn’t seen. But it wasn’t the killers who thought in the clichéd stereotypes of horror fiction. It was the British press.
Because of the ugliness of the murder, lots of people clearly find it impossible to accept that Venables and Thompson could have been successfully rehabilitated. For many, their reported sorrow is just a devious ploy. In Evelyn Waugh’s famous story “Mr. Loveday’s Little Outing,” a murderer who has been, for many years, the mildest, gentlest, sweetest-natured prisoner imaginable is finally paroled, and instantly kills again. This fear of re-offending is constantly voiced by opponents of Venables’s and Thompson’s release, and this is the spark of suspicion that British newspapers are trying so hard to fan into a fire.
Yet all the best-informed sources have been telling us that Venables and Thompson really have changed; that they are poster boys for the efficacy of rehabilitation. Mark Leech of the ex-offenders charity Unlock, for example, says that there is “no prospect that they will re-offend.” So now we have to face this straightforward either/or decision. Either we believe that rehabilitation is possible, in which case we must accept the opinion of the experts that it has succeeded in these cases—or we reject that option, in which case, let’s stop trying to rehabilitate people and decide that prison sentences should be society’s revenge on criminals, who should be treated as lost causes and locked up for good in dreadful conditions. If people can’t get better, if rotten eggs are rotten eggs and bad apples can’t become good, then let’s just throw them away.
The big questions just keep on coming. Repentance and forgiveness aren’t as closely connected as people imagine. We sometimes forgive the unrepentant, and on other occasions condemn the genuinely remorseful. So even if the Bulger killers really are different now, even if the eighteen-year-olds who are to be released on life licenses have been utterly transformed, they can be allowed to live the rest of their lives in anonymous peace only if a separate process—call it the growth of fairness—in the hearts of those most injured by their crime and, beyond that, in society at large leads to their being forgiven.
It is because this is so complex and important a matter that the rabble-rousing behavior of much of the British press has seemed particularly disgusting, and the old accusations about it being out of control have seemed unusually apt. People, even lifetime free-speech stalwarts, have been saying that the behavior of the British tabloids makes the free-speech argument harder and harder to sustain—that a cherished democratic p
rinciple is being destruction-tested by yellow journalists. The feedback loop between events and their reporting is now so tight, so fast, that the media are major protagonists in the stories they report; and in this story they are working to subvert all civilized principles of justice and creating in their readers a lynch-mob mentality that may actually get people killed.
Something awful is happening here, some general degradation of public response caused by years of exposure to tabloid values. Spanish newspapers are reported to be prepared to pay big money for information about Venables’s and Thompson’s whereabouts—not because Spanish readers are particularly interested but because it’s summer and Spain is full of Brits. The Internet, that brothel of irresponsibility, has already started providing this information, and more will no doubt flood out soon. Jon Venables and Robert Thompson can run but they probably can’t hide, and in a Britain that’s increasingly conducting itself like Dodge City or Tombstone at their wildest, these young men will be lucky not to end up in Boot Hill. We can only hope they don’t, because on the run along with them is another idea of Britain, in which restraint is valued more highly than melodrama, compassion is better than revenge, and dignity is worth keeping for longer than eight years.