COLUMN: Lies Their Mother Told Me

From Dan Schorr's "Behind Enemy Lines," Fall '94 The woman who manipulated half the country into searching for the two boys she cruelly drowned in a lake now stands accused of a variety of charges in and out of the legal system. When it rains, it pours. Just when you think your kids are dead and you're on trial for murder, it gets worse. According to American conservatism, you're the embodiment of the decline of decent American values. To the Left, you're the microcosm of a racist society. Future Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich explained that the tragedy "vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting." Gingrich decried this "moral decay that can only be remedied by electing Republicans." We've always been told that the Democratic welfare state encourages undeterred procreation, but here the effects have apparently been reversed. There are similarities between excessive childbirth and excessive child murder: both incompetently bringing children into the world and competently killing them are morally bad, and thus fine targets for political accusations. After the complicated analysis of why the Republicans dominated Election '94, the answer was simple: Democrats and Democratic policies tacitly support baby killing. Well, they don't support it, but they sure don't go out of their way to stop it either. The Smith case allows us to look inside ourselves. While some are too ignorant to recognize the important political significance of the act, others can now wonder whether they too lack the family values that Smith callously rejected. To her credit, Smith did show appropriate values when she explained that she "prayed to the Lord every day" while the children were missing. But even Gingrich, the proponent of a new constitutional amendment allowing prayer in public school, must recognize that this pious behavior was too little, too late. If only Smith had watched more C-SPAN or attended more Gingrich lectures -- the world population might be higher by two. But not only was Smith cruel to her kids, she was also insensitive to minorities. And while her children's suffering is over, the pain of those who have been offended has yet to cease. It seems that Smith needed a scapegoat to hide her crime, and told the police that her children had been kidnapped by a black male. The fact that she lied and that we can never totally trust her again is just part of the problem. Many prominent Americans, such as Jesse Jackson, are now asking why Smith chose to accuse a black male, and why society was so quick to accept the accusation as truthful. In a U.S. News & World Report article, Harrison Rainie explained that the Smith events "gave viewers an excuse to...indulge in some racism." The Philadelphia Inquirer's Mark Bowden commented that the accusation "slandered...every black man in America." Does the fact that she chose a black man reveal society's racist instinct to blame negative events, especially crime, on minorities? Many people are arguing that accusing a black man led to a generalized condemnation of black men. Who exactly is making this racist generalization? We can clearly start with those who recognize its existence in the first place. What was the significance of Smith's choice of felon? Some people claim that her choice of race is simply a reflection of the demographic facts of the country's crime statistics, but such an argument is far too racist to be addressed in this fine publication. If Smith is a racist, let's not forget that it looks like she's also a murderer. Bad character is the least of her faults. Yet when her family held a press conference last week, her brother declared, "We apologize to all the black citizens in Union [S.C.] and elsewhere." They might have apologized to young children everywhere, but apparently kids and infants don't watch the news. Like Gingrich, some liberals see hope in morality and religion. According to the Rev. Lorenzo Jones, Jr., hope for slandered black males can be found in religion, for "God ... knows how it feels to be falsely accused." Now Smith has not only murdered her children, but symbolically crucified a significant portion of the U.S. population. Whether Smith is representative of a declining, liberal America or simply a patriarchal, bigoted society, one thing is clear. With a mother like that, there was little hope for the kids anyway, so maybe they are better off now. They died before they were indoctrinated into the evil lifestyle of their mother and the evil society that she embodies, and thus at least their souls are pure. Or possibly these generalizations are generally off target. It's tempting to scapegoat people for the alleged faults of our country, but let's not get carried away. Give the poor woman a break. She's not the devil. She's not the manifestation of our collective societal sins. My God, before we condemn her again, let's not forget: she's just a child murderer. Dan Schorr is a senior English major from Valley Stream, New York. Behind Enemy Lines appears alternate Fridays.