saturday marks the second anniversary of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. One hundred sixty-eight people died, more than 500 were injured and two men, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, have been charged with the crime. Jury selection in McVeigh’s trial is expected to be completed perhaps by next week. Nichols is scheduled to go on trial soon after McVeigh.
The stunning crime focused attention on the extreme right wing in America, especially on rabidly anti-government militias. But rather than harming the movement, according to Klanwatch and other hate group monitors, the bombing and attendant publicity has actually drawn more people to it.
Salon spoke to Catherine McNicol Stock, author of the recently published
“Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain” (Cornell University Press). Stock, a Yale-trained historian, is assistant professor of history and director of the
American Studies Program at Connecticut College in New London, Conn. Her previous book was “Main Street in Crisis: The Great Depression and the Old Middle Class on the Northern Plains” (1992, University of North Carolina Press).
The immediate reaction to the Oklahoma City bombing
was, “No American would do that — it had to have been planted by an
outsider, perhaps someone from the Middle East.” But you
argue that such acts have an all-American heritage.
Yes, one thing I try to say — and it gets me in trouble
sometimes — is that some of the basic ideology of right-wing extremists
should be definitely considered all-American. And some of the people who had similar beliefs we consider to be quite heroic.
Going back to colonial times.
Right. Ethan Allen, for example, of Vermont, or Nathaniel Bacon, who led
Bacon’s Rebellion, are early examples of anti-government radicalism. In 1676, Bacon led a group of former indentured servants on a march on the
capital of Virginia, called Jamestown at that time, and
especially against its aristocratic and arrogant governor, William
Berkeley.
These were rural rebellions.
What they wanted was more access to land; they wanted to have their own homesteads.
They also wanted equal standing in the government — they didn’t want
Berkeley and his cronies to have all the power while the newly
freed fellows had no power. Well, that’s a very all-American
idea. And Bacon is often considered to be a precursor of the American
Revolution. He rose up against Gov. Berkeley in the same way
that 100 years later all of the colonists would rise up against
the British. I also should point out that on the
way to Jamestown, Bacon massacred as many Native Americans as he
could.
Most people would think of the American Revolution as
“progressive” and democratic with a small “d.” Are you suggesting that it’s not just rhetoric when right-wing extremists today say they are acting in the spirit of the Revolution?
The point I try to make is that some of their ideas go very far back in our past. And they were held by people on the left, especially on the agrarian
left, as recently as the 1930s. What’s really important to realize is that these ideas have now been completely co-opted by the far right, and that the hatefulness and
the regressiveness in some of these ideas have won the day.
And the violence.
Yes, historically, there’s been a vigilante
style for redressing grievances. You see rural radicals in a
bunch of these historical movements pretty much taking these issues
into their own hands, often violently.
How did this traditional heartland radicalism re-emerge in our times?
In the 1980s, during the farm crisis in the Midwest and the Far West,
right-wing organizers found a lot of interest and new recruits. The
Posse Comitatus (a far-right group opposed to taxation) organized
lots of folks in Nebraska and Iowa. A lot of terrible things were happening at the time. In the 1970s, when the FHA (Farmers’ Home Administration)
were giving loans to farmers to expand their acreage, (Secretary of
Agriculture) Earl Butz said, “get bigger, get better or get out.” So
farmers started to expand. Then interest rates went sky-high. They
couldn’t pay back their loans and a federal agency
foreclosed on their farms. That didn’t make people feel very good
about the government!
Where were the Democrats, part of whose base was supposed to be rural America?
The Democrats were concerned with urban problems — urban crime problems, in particular — and were trying to forge a coalition of wealthy Easterners and
minorities. That left middle-class white rural people out of
the equation. The Republican Party was only concerned with wealthy
people. So both major political parties walked
away from the problems of rural America. People there felt alienated, they had no voice in the political process.
Which you say was a common theme in rebellions of the past.
Absolutely. When we think of the American Revolution, we tend
to think of people in Boston, Philadelphia and Charleston getting
fed up with the centers of economic and political power in London.
But at that same moment people on the frontier were fed up with the
centers of economic and political power in Boston, Philadelphia and
Charleston. One historian at the turn of the century described
this by saying there were two revolutions. It wasn’t just about
home rule, it was about who would rule at home. Was it going to be
these big, powerful guys or ordinary back-country Americans?
Were the themes of these early rebels similar to those of the McVeighs of today?
Yes, particularly with centralized power, both economic and political
power. In the Whisky Rebellion in the 1790s, a group of Pennsylvania frontiersmen
refused to pay a tax that was imposed by the federal government.
They said, “I thought we just fought a war about taxation with no
representation.” They thought the federal government had no
right to tax their whiskey. That’s one trend that holds a lot of
these groups together.
The modern militias refuse to recognize any authority higher than the local
sheriff.
And they only recognize the first 10 Amendments, and
they’re going to run their affairs their own way. Again, we’ve seen
this over and over again. You see it in the 1930s in the
Farmers Holiday Movement strikes, and lynch mobs and posses and
union massacres in the Far West. You see this style of taking the law into their own hands over and over again.
Was there a populist, democratic rural radicalism that was less extreme and less violent?
In the book, I separate out two strands, “producer radicalism”
and vigilantism — what I call the politics of hope and the politics
of hate. I argue how close those two sides of the coin
have always been.
“Producer radicalism”?
“Producer radicalism” or “producerism” is a term
historians use for democratic or progressive movements. Agrarian
liberalism is another term, or Jeffersonian liberalism. These were movements in which small farmers, small landholders, have tried to get a fair share. The one movement that most people know about is the Populist Party in the 1880s and 1890s. Some were cotton farmers, some were wheat farmers, some were in extractive industry, and they said, “Look, big business is getting too big a share of the profit from what small producers make. The profit should go to the person who makes it, and farmers who are growing food shouldn’t be starving to death.” At that time the
railroads were charging exorbitant amounts to Western farmers to
ship their products.
That time has been called the “Populist
moment,” a moment in America when anything seemed possible. But I like to remind America, too, that many Southern Populists helped create the Jim Crow laws in the South, and that Populist rhetoric was absolutely rife with anti-Semitism.
How do you tie these historical issues of rural America to Timothy
McVeigh, who is from a small rust-belt town in New York state?
In my book I include small industrial towns in what
I consider to be rural areas. Rural America is not all farms. But even if you don’t agree with me, you have to admit that Terry Nichols (McVeigh’s alleged accomplice) comes exactly from this background. He loses his farm during the farm crisis.
In a lot of ways I think of McVeigh as
the blue-collar, rust-belt loser who was making minimum wage as a
security guard. Then he meets and links up with this classic
prototypical rural radical, who had been hard-core since he lost his farm.
McVeigh and Nichols are accused of blowing up a federal building, which you see as an anti-big-government or “anti-bigness” act.
Henry Wallace called it “big bureaucrats with their briefcases.” In the New Deal period, it was called the “brain trust.” That anti-bigness includes big business and
corporate farms, too.
You know “Little House on the Prairie,” Laura Ingalls
Wilder’s book written in the 1930s? Set in the 1880s and ’90s, it appears to be total rural nostalgia. Wilder’s daughter claims they were written as an attack against the New Deal. So I went through the
books looking for references to the government, and in every case
it’s this big, ugly, alienating, incompetent machinery up against the
intimate, small community of people on the frontier.
Do you seen anything specifically new that sets the McVeighs apart from these historical antecedents?
A lot of people make connections to
McVeigh’s Gulf War experience — you know, learning to kill and hate.
More important than that, I think, is the Vietnam generation that’s in
a lot of these movements. A lot of these guys did learn to kill, to love
weapons and to hate the government in Vietnam. The
government didn’t let them win, and they wanted to win.
How many McVeighs and Nichols do you think are out there today?
I’ve been on a lot of radio shows, and people call in from rural
areas and they say, “You know I wouldn’t blow up a building but it
feels like there’s no place left for white men in this country anymore.” And they don’t sound like lunatics. They say, “Honest to God,
I can’t get a decent job!”
We used to hear a lot about “angry white men.” You’re saying that we really need to be looking at angry rural white men.
There’s significant economic dislocation in both
manufacturing and agriculture in rural America. The only work many people can get is at places like McDonald’s — and you’re supposed to
be grateful. Many of the manufacturing jobs, like meat packing, that have returned to
states like Iowa and
Wisconsin, to semi-industrial rural America, now employ
immigrant workers who work for minimum or sub-minimum wage. That just makes things even more dreadful.
What other issues come up when you’re on talk radio?
Waco. Waco is really something that people are still struggling
with. They say, “You can’t possibly think that what the government
did at Waco was right.” And of course I don’t!
You have some personal links to the subject you write about.
One of the things that first interested me in being
a historian was that my grandparents, who were from North Dakota, all their lives carried these incredibly strong negative feelings about Roosevelt. They admitted that Roosevelt had essentially saved North Dakota and many of their friends from
utter and complete failure, had made a big difference in the Depression, and essentially saved the world in World War II. But my grandfather just
basically thought Roosevelt was a Communist. He was one
of these people who thought farm programs killed anybody’s sense
of self-worth and that welfare was wrong. I’m listening to all this
during dinner table conversations in the 1970s. But it was
still so current for them! So I became interested in what certain periods in America could have been like to provoke such strong feelings.
Did any of your relatives act on those feelings?
After my grandfather died, my grandmother
learned that the minister at the First Presbyterian Church in Grand
Forks had been masquerading — he was not ordained.
So I looked into this a little and found that he was actually the Grand Dragon
of the Ku Klux Klan. He married my McNicol grandparents. My
grandmother, I assume, never knew this about him. But one of her
parents was a deacon in the church and my great-grandmother ran the
Sunday school. You can’t tell me they didn’t know that about the
minister! The KKK was extremely active in Grand Forks. And my
grandparents were the most wonderful people I ever knew.
That’s why, when I was writing “Rural Radicals,” I felt a little as if
I was writing about my own people. I tried to tell the truth. In Clinton’s first inaugural he spoke of the honor and
cruelty of the American past and of having to know them both. When
I teach, that’s what I always say: We’re going to know them both.
So live with it!
The trial of Timothy McVeigh opened with a media bang last week but has since slowed to a crawl. Over 350 prospective jurors are being put through a long, detailed examination. Sixty-four “death penalty qualified” candidates will survive the first cut before a final panel of 12 will be chosen. The process will likely take several weeks.
McVeigh is charged with murder, conspiracy and terrorism in the April 19, 1995, bombing of an Oklahoma City federal building that killed 168 people and injured more than 500. McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who will be tried later, both face the death penalty if convicted.
Apart from the actual evidence to be presented, two major issues have arisen. First, given all the pre-trial publicity — including reports of an alleged confession — can the defendants get a fair trial before an impartial jury? And, secondly, how big a role should victims’ rights play in the proceedings?
Salon talked with William Pizzi, a former federal prosecutor and professor of law at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Pizzi has taught criminal law for more than 20 years and is an expert on victims’ rights.
Prospective jurors are being questioned on everything from their favorite television shows to what they think of the federal government. At the end of the day, how difficult is it going to be to impanel a fair jury?
I think it’s going to be hard. The reports of McVeigh’s “confession” are going to have a tremendous impact on a jury. And it’s going to make it much harder for the defense to get a hung jury, let alone an acquittal.
Why?
It’s very hard to put that kind of information out of your mind. It’s inevitable, I think, that jurors, somewhere in the back of their mind, are going to think, “He’s already confessed … he confessed!” It’s a big problem for the defense.
Judge Richard Matsch, who is presiding over the trial, has said he believes that if prospective jurors are questioned properly, it’s possible to have a fair trial. Which may be why he’s allowing both sides to take so long with the questioning.
Sure, and I think the jurors will try very hard to be fair. But based on the empirical studies I’ve seen, it’s very hard for jurors to put damaging information of that kind out of their minds, no matter how hard they try.
What empirical studies?
Social science studies that compare juries that have heard incriminating though inadmissible evidence with those that have not. The studies show that juries which know of inadmissible evidence, even though they are told to disregard it, are affected in their verdicts.
And we don’t even know if McVeigh’s “confession,” published by the Dallas Morning News, then Playboy, then Newsweek, is real or not. What’s your speculation?
I have no idea. Maybe someone hacked into the computer — a disgruntled employee, a cleaning person. It could have been an accident, information wrongly transmitted, a complete mistake. Unfortunately for the defense, it’s water over the dam.
Apart from the “confession,” as a former federal prosecutor, how strong do you think the prosecution’s case is?
I have to say, I think it’s going to be a strong case. First of all, the prosecution has momentum going for it in terms of the horror of the crime. Everyone has seen footage of the crime scene and the enormous devastation. Second, they have an insider, a co-conspirator, (Michael) Fortier, who’s going to say, “We went to Kansas City, we used the phone, we stole this and bought that.” Fortier’s got some credibility problems but I assume they’ll have certain pieces of his testimony corroborated so it’s not just his word. And I assume he’ll be very well prepared. He’ll be able to say, “McVeigh was always angry, he did this, he kept telling us, ‘Let’s do it,’” or whatever.
They also have a certain amount of circumstantial evidence — the Ryder truck, which they’ll be able to say McVeigh rented, or at least was there when it was rented.
The prosecution had a pretty strong case in the O.J. Simpson trial, including DNA. Look what happened to that.
Yes, but this time you have a judge who’s going to control the courtroom. The lawyers are not going to get the kind of leeway you had in the Simpson case.
The same thing was said about Judge Lance Ito. Judge Richard Matsch has a very good reputation, but why will he have any more success with a high-profile trial than Judge Ito?
Partly because he’s a federal judge, and federal judges tend to control trials much more. They keep lawyers on a tighter leash, for one thing.
Why is that?
Federal judges are lifetime appointees, unlike many state judges, who have to run for office. They’re at the pinnacle of the profession, intellectually confident, and they’re used to big cases.
So what can the defense do?
They’ll need to put the prosecution on the defensive, just like they did in the Simpson case. They’ll attack the FBI lab work as atrocious. They’ll say, “Don’t trust the authorities.”
Which definitely worked in the Simpson case.
Yes, but I’m betting the FBI agents who will testify will come across better. But who knows? It could turn out one of them is another Mark Fuhrman — although it’s less likely.
So you think McVeigh will be convicted.
Yes, that’s my feeling. Of course there are uncertainties. You could get someone on the jury who has an ax to grind, or a juror whom you couldn’t even convince that Elvis is dead. And this is a death penalty case.
Advocates of victims rights are said to have something of a breakthrough with this case. The trial won’t be televised, but victims’ relatives will be able to watch from either the U.S. District Court in Denver or via a special closed-circuit feed in a “virtual” courtroom in Oklahoma City. How big an impact will this have on the trial?
I don’t think it means a great deal for the trial itself. I did think that Judge Matsch’s original ruling that the relatives couldn’t watch any of the trial if they were going to testify during the penalty phase was way too broad. I mean, what could they say during the sentencing phase? They’ll talk about their loved ones and I really don’t think that’s going to be influenced by what happens during the trial.
I do think it has an important symbolic effect, however. It’s a way of saying the system cares about victims. Matsch was forced to change his ruling after President Clinton signed the Victims’ Rights Clarification Act. I guess you could say it’s Congress’ way of overruling Judge Matsch on this issue. It’s not especially controversial in this case, although normally Congress is not meant to be interfering in an ongoing trial.
Some critics say that this is the thin end of the wedge, that Congress is likely to interfere a lot more.
The victims’ rights movement has certainly become very powerful. There’s a proposed constitutional amendment in the Senate, backed by Senator (Dianne) Feinstein (D-Calif.) which would give victims the right to be consulted about the handling of the case, the right to be present, and the right to be heard at sentencing.
What chance do you think it has?
At this point, about half of the states, some through constitutional amendments, recognize victims’ rights — the right to restitution, the right to be told if an offender is being paroled, the right to be told about bail or a plea bargain. I don’t know if the federal constitutional change will get out of the Senate, but there’s certainly pressure at the local level.
Is this a good thing?
Yes. I think there’s a tendency for people in the system to see a trial as two-sided. I call it the adversarial mentality: Because we have a prosecutor and a defense attorney, there are only two interests involved, the state and the defendant. But where do the victims fit in? Often they’re caught in the middle. I sat in trials in Germany where rape victims have their own attorney. That’s unimaginable to American lawyers.
Who are more used to trials as boxing matches.
That’s right. And the judge is just a referee who occasionally steps in and says, “Oh, that was a little too low,” rather than saying, “I don’t just want to see which lawyer is the better fighter, I want to help the jury see the truth.”
April 8, 1997
Ros Davidson is a San Francisco freelance journalist.
Can Timothy McVeigh get a fair trial? Join a new discussion starting up in the Headlines section of Table Talk.
IT WORKS — SO MICROSOFT BOUGHT IT
WebTV is that rarity — an Internet access business with an effective product. Now it’ll have the marketing muscle of the Redmond behemoth too.
BY SCOTT ROSENBERG
it’s easy to see why WebTV would be delighted to sell out to Microsoft for $425 million — aside from the instant wealth for its founders, of course. WebTV didn’t have as stellar a Christmas as it hoped, and Microsoft’s profoundly powerful marketing muscle and seemingly inexhaustible well of capital amount to an offer few startup technology companies can refuse.
But what is Microsoft getting for its money? It’s not the company’s current customer base that attracted Bill Gates. WebTV has by most accounts sold something more than 50,000 but probably fewer than 100,000 units of its product — a $350 box that sits on top of a TV set and feeds Web pages and e-mail onto the TV screen. WebTV designs the technology, but the hardware is actually manufactured and sold by Philips and Sony.
In order to use the WebTV box you’ve got to subscribe to the WebTV Network, at $20 a month. But WebTV’s presumptive subscriber base of between 50,000 and 100,000 (the company won’t divulge actual figures) isn’t terribly significant to Microsoft, whose own Microsoft Network has more than 2 million members.
Almost certainly, Microsoft decided to buy out WebTV for two reasons — its valuable technology patents and its track record in producing genuinely usable consumer products. The technology’s appeal is obvious: WebTV’s proprietary circuitry and software, by reducing flicker and sometimes rearranging layouts and design, really do make Web pages readable and usable on a TV set, something many analysts thought was impossible. As the war between the computer and broadcast industries to control the next wave of digital television accelerates, these kinds of engineering tricks are likely to have a deep impact on how consumers react to the different players’ offerings.
But WebTV’s market experience is probably even more important to Microsoft than its technical know-how. For all its limitations, WebTV remains unique: It’s a consumer Internet access business whose product actually works, now. Unlike virtually any other supplier today — from big Internet service providers like AT&T and Earthlink to cable Net access providers like @Home and Time Warner’s Road Runner — WebTV lets the technically unversed get real access to the Net without having to hire a consultant to make it all work. Microsoft has always promised user-friendly “plug and play” experiences, but its performance has been so inconsistent that its detractors, sneering at the experience of trying to make a Windows expansion card work, coined the derisive phrase “plug and pray.”
What WebTV built — and Microsoft now owns — is essentially the same thing that the media were touting a year or so ago as the network computer: a cheap machine to let people get on the Net without plunking down $1,500 for a dauntingly complex computer. As it turned out, the press had gotten the whole network computer story wrong — most efforts along that line have been intended not for the mass consumer market but for the corporate workplace, where the network computer could solidify central control of computing resources. WebTV is what the press told us the NC was supposed to be: a product that could bring the Web to millions of homes. But WebTV itself apparently wasn’t meeting with great marketing success, and that’s no doubt one of the areas in which it hopes Microsoft will help out.
Microsoft and WebTV already have one big thing in common: Neither company has any particular allegiance to the “open standards” ideology that built the Net and the Web in the first place. WebTV achieves its foolproof plug-and-play performance in part because it’s a closed-system technology — the WebTV box will only work if you use WebTV as your service provider. When the company was a heroic little start-up, people were willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and not judge this proprietary scheme as a secret plot to take over the Net. Now that WebTV is becoming a division of Microsoft — a company that has always viewed the Internet as an inconvenient roadblock on the path to its rightful monopoly — this closed-door strategy is bound to raise lots of hackles.
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The gay community's dirty secret -- domestic violence -- is finally coming out of the closet.
By Ros Davidson
gays in America, for all the progress that’s been made, are still discriminated against, beaten up and sometimes worse. One of the targets of Atlanta’s so-called “serial bomber” last Friday was a gay night club. Wednesday’s New York Times reported that more gays than ever are being ejected from the military, despite President Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell policy.”
Such discrimination from the outside, along with the destructive force of the AIDS epidemic, has tended to obscure the internal problem that plagues the gay community: domestic violence. In fact, several recent studies suggest that same-sex domestic violence may be occurring at a similar rate — approximately one-third of all relationships — as heterosexual domestic violence.
A six-city survey conducted by gay activists last year turned up 1,566 reported incidents of gay domestic violence, several hundred more than reported incidents
of anti-gay harassment and violence.
Salon talked with Crystal Weston, the nation’s first full-time advocate for
victims of gay, lesbian and transgender domestic violence. She
has been with the Family Violence Project at the San Francisco
District Attorney’s Office since mid-November.
Most people have at least heard about “gay-bashing,” but may be surprised at the extent of violence inside the gay community. How does it differ with domestic violence between a man and a woman?
The cycle is very
similar to heterosexual domestic violence — tension-building, actual violence, and then a renewed honeymoon phase where the cycle starts all over again. It’s really about power and control, and that’s regardless of gender or sexuality.
How do the issues of power and control get played out in the gay community?
The closet plays a role in cases where the batterer is out and
the person who’s being battered is not. In that case, the victim has no one to
turn to because no one even knows he or she is in a homosexual
relationship. Using children is another method, where the batterer would threaten to “out” his or her partner — who is not out of the closet — to the children or other members of their family.
Is AIDS a factor?
Yes. A recent study by CUAV (Community United Against Violence)
revealed that if the batterer is HIV-positive,
sometimes the batteree doesn’t want to leave them. They feel
sorry for them because they might get sick and they want to help
them. If the person who is battered is HIV-positive, they may be
too scared to leave because they may feel, “I’ll die alone,” or, “He’s
better than nobody at all.” Or the person being battered may be
frightened to leave the relationship because of the prevalence of HIV on the dating scene.
Depending on whose figures you believe, up to 10 percent of the U.S. population may be gay, which means there may be much more violence in the gay community than anyone thought. Why are we only beginning to recognize this now?
There have been books on the subject, going back to the 1980s. But there has been resistance to the idea because it hasn’t conformed with the traditional concentration on heterosexual domestic violence — especially by feminists.
What do you mean?
Much of their theory is based on gender dynamics, misogyny,
men hating women. Bringing male-male and female-female violence into the equation
undermines their whole gender-based power theory of why domestic violence occurs.
It kind of throws a monkey wrench into their whole underlying philosophy.
What about resistance from the gay and lesbian community
who don’t want their dirty laundry aired in public?
Definitely. Straight battered women have tremendous shame
and denial, and the same thing is felt on a
community-wide basis for gay people. Added to that is the sense of not wanting to increase the negative attention and attacks and pressure the gay community already feels itself under from the outside.
How easy or difficult is it for victims to get help? Is it fair to assume the police don’t take cases of homosexual domestic violence very seriously? Talking
with others about gay domestic violence, I’ve heard that police might assume it’s a “cat fight” or something sexual.
In general, police don’t like any domestic violence calls because they don’t want to
play so-called “social worker.” Gays are deterred from seeking help
because they feel that the police will be heterosexist and homophobic and oftentimes they are. San Francisco, I must say, probably has a leg up because the District Attorney’s office has made it a priority. We’re working
to teach the police not to make assumptions based on gender or anything like that.
What other assumptions should they not make?
Don’t assume that the person who is perceived as more
masculine is the aggressor. Sometimes it’s the smaller
person who is wreaking havoc.
Are there shelters for victims of gay violence, like battered women’s shelters?
There are no shelters for gay men. Lesbians can obviously go to the women’s shelters,
but studies show that oftentimes they don’t feel very welcome
there because everything — all the literature, all the help — is
heterosexually oriented. They don’t feel like their situation
is really understood or acknowledged.
The extent of lesbian violence may be an even bigger surprise to straight society than gay male violence.
People are really surprised, especially around lesbian
battering. The notion among feminists,
lesbians — among women in general — is that this is a male problem:
Men beat woman and, yes, we can imagine men beating other men, but
women would never do such a thing. As if it’s genetic. It’s part of an older lesbian-feminist paradigm which says most of the problems in the world come from
men and if we could isolate ourselves from them, then things would
be kind of idyllic. It’s not true. But people
in lesbian communities don’t want to talk about that publicly.
It’s like airing dirty laundry.
So you’re having a harder time reaching lesbian victims of violence?
Women don’t come in. Of the 95 cases I’ve seen since last June, less than five were women. A lot of women internalize the bad things that happen to them. They believe that
it’s their fault, or “If I’d just done X, this wouldn’t have
happened.” I think there’s less of an expectation that the
authorities would do something, that they have a right to be
protected.
Friday, Jan 17, 1997 8:00 PM UTC
Tens of thousands of women are convinced that silicone breast implants damaged their health.
Billions of dollars are at stake in lawsuits. But the editor of one of America's most prestigious
medical journals denies that there is any evidence that implants are dangerous and blames
"junk science."
By Ros Davidson
Almost five years after the Food and Drug Administration announced a partial ban on silicone breast implants, billions of dollars’ worth of litigation seems no closer to settlement. In the wake of the ban, tens of thousands of American women joined in a class-action suit against implant manufacturers, including the largest, Dow Corning, which as a result of the suit filed for bankruptcy in 1995. There are, in addition, perhaps tens of thousands of individual lawsuits pending in various American courts.
In 1994, manufacturers agreed to the largest class-action settlement ever — $4.25 billion — but it was not enough to cover all of the claimants who said their implants made them sick. Last month Dow Corning proposed setting aside up to $2 billion to settle claims as part of its bankruptcy reorganization plan. But most of the money would only be available if a “science trial” determined that implants cause diseases. Women in the United States had until last Wednesday to file claims; those living overseas have until February 14th. On Jan. 11, plaintiffs’ attorneys requested permission to file a competing payment plan.
Some medical experts have criticized the proceedings as a colossal waste of money because, they say, the notion that silicone implants cause harm is unproven at best and a scam at worst. Salon talked with one of those critics, Dr Marcia Angell, M.D., Executive Editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine and the author of “Science on Trial: The Clash of Medical Evidence and the Law in the Breast Implant Case” (W.W. Norton, 1996).
In “Science on Trial,” you contend there is no proven link between breast implants and serious disease. You say the breast implant case got as far as it did because of our embrace of “junk science.”
I used the breast implant controversy as an example of a growing phenomenon: the disconnect between scientific evidence and the way scientific questions are handled by the public, the media and in the courtrooms. Whether breast implants cause disease in the rest of the body is a scientific question. It’s not a matter of opinion; it’s not a matter of an adversarial process. Yet what we’re finding is that people are pulling answers out of the air based on greed and bias and fear and anything but science.
How did people get to “pull answers out of the air”?
The media, at least initially, slavishly accepted the view that breast implants were dangerous devices foisted on the unsuspecting public by the greedy manufacturers, and the FDA had been complicit in covering it up. They accepted the story whole cloth and broadcast it to the public, and the public took that point of view. Add to that the fact that the plaintiffs’ attorneys and some of their clients stood to make a great deal of money on the premise that breast implants cause serious disease, and the rest was almost inevitable.
As editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, how did you become interested in this controversy?
Initially because David Kessler, the head of the FDA, when he decided to ban silicone gel-filled breast implants in April 1992, submitted an article to us explaining why he had taken this decision. I was quite happy to publish it. I thought it was important. Yet as I read the article it struck me that he was making a mistake. He acknowledged there was no evidence that the breast implants were dangerous. But, he said, since the manufacturers had not fulfilled their obligation to show that they were safe, he was going to take them off the market. I thought that since a million or so women already had them and there was no evidence — despite the fact that they’d been on the market for about 30 years — that they caused dreadful diseases, that he would do well not to alarm these women. That he should have been more circumspect.
He should have insisted that the manufacturers generate the data they are supposed to generate. He could have penalized them in one way or another, but to yank them off the market in the face of the fact that a million women already had them and would be terrified by the implication of this, was, I felt, a misjudgment.
Did you have any preconceived notions about breast implants?
I had never thought about it before one way or the other. About the only position that I had was a great belief in patient autonomy. And a part of Dr Kessler’s decision had to do with women who had breast implants for cosmetic reasons versus those who had them after mastectomies for breast cancer. What he said was, those who’d had implants for cosmetic augmentation would not be able to obtain silicone gel-filled breast implants at all. Whereas those who were getting them for reconstruction could do so only if they agreed to be in clinical trials. I felt that this was an invidious decision. It was in a sense passing judgment on women’s reasons for doing it, that it was in some sense paternalistic.
You’ve described yourself as a liberal democrat and a feminist.
Yes. And I thought he was treating women like little girls.
Which, you think, helped generate the subsequent fear and hysteria.
In the editorial I wrote accompanying Dr. Kessler’s paper, I said what I’ve just said to you: that I thought he made the wrong judgment and that it would lead to unwarranted alarm. And it did. Women rushed to court, rushed to their plastic surgeons to have the implants removed. A lot of women did both. There were even women who tried to carve out their own implants with razor blades because they thought they couldn’t afford the plastic surgeons’ fees. There was hysteria which the plaintiffs’ attorneys jumped right on, and the trickle of lawsuit that had been going on throughout the ’80s suddenly swelled to a torrent. Dow Corning alone had some 20,000 lawsuits filed against it in the two years after the ban.
But in the lawsuits, some of which have resulted in huge awards to the plaintiffs, there was testimony from scientific experts about the harm.
Yes. What they do is they get someone who has minimal credentials. They can be scientists of no particular distinction and in a field that’s irrelevant to the case in question, and they come and give their opinion and that’s called scientific testimony. In fact their opinion can be little more than an educated guess. And in this case, it was a bought educated guess.
Dow Corning, in its bankruptcy reorganization plan filed with the court, is proposing what’s been called a “science trial” with an advisory panel of scientists.
That’s something I recommend strongly in the book. Instead of judges relying on experts produced by the two sides and paid by them, guaranteed to say what they’re supposed to say with no particular evidence, the judges could find independent experts who would testify on the basis of the science –for example what has been published in the peer-review literature on this subject — and would interpret that science for the judge.
A federal judge in Oregon, Judge Robert Jones, just did this in a breast implant case and I think it’s a beautiful decision. He called four independent medical experts — an epidemiologist, an immunologist, a rheumatologist and a toxicologist — consolidated 70 cases in his district into one, and had them listen to all the testimony from both sides for four days, based on the scientific literature that supported each side’s point of view. At the end, the independent panel wrote an evaluation of what it had heard. On the basis of those evaluations, which were scathing, the judge threw out the cases altogether. There was not one bit of evidence for the plaintiffs that met the standards set by the Supreme Court in 1993 — that expert testimony must be both reliable and relevant.
Now a federal judge in Alabama who is overseeing a settlement involving three other implant manufacturers is doing the same thing.
Yes, but his panel won’t issue its findings for probably another year. A district judge in New York is also doing the same thing. So I think the tide is turning against junk science in the courtroom. Judges are beginning to say, “Wait a minute, we’ve got to stop this stuff.” Just having some man in a white coat saying, “Yeah, breast implants cause disease” is not the same thing as scientific testimony.
What about the argument that scientists can’t find the “link” because they are looking for the wrong thing, that in fact what the plaintiffs have is not a traditional auto-immune disease, it’s a new disease, “silicone toxicity”?
Well, prove it. From what I’ve read nobody has come up with a consistent description of this non-classical disease, much less objective criteria that can be measured. It’s not enough to assert that there’s this crazy disease that breast implants cause. OK, prove it, and I’d be the first the say, well, you’ve proved it. I know of no such studies. Speculation is no substitute for evidence.
Some critics have called “Gulf War Syndrome” junk science. But an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association earlier this month suggested there might be such a syndrome, caused by a combination of usually harmless chemicals. It strikes me that the jury is still out on this one.
Oh, you bet. But if you assert that chemicals in the Persian Gulf cause these diseases, the burden ought to be on people to show that they indeed have definable diagnosable disease caused by chemicals. It’s not enough to say, “Oh, there was a place that was blown up and it’s conceivable there were chemicals and it’s conceivable that 20,000 people were exposed, and it’s conceivable that instead of acting immediately, as sarin [a nerve gas] is known to act, it took a long time.” Yes, it may be so, but it must be demonstrated. Otherwise you’re just dealing with speculation and speculation is no way to reach a decision about something like this. This is not to say that the Persian Gulf War Syndrome couldn’t be a real phenomenon caused by chemicals released in the air during the war, but we don’t have the evidence.
Prospective plaintiffs might say, it’s all very well for science to look at this, but science moves so slowly.
Yes, and that’s the way it is. Having the judgment made in the absence of evidence that yes, chemicals caused your disease, I’m not sure would help the victims at all. They still have the disease. And they’re still getting medical care, which in the army is free.
Why has “junk science” in general become so widespread? You’ve talked about health scares sweeping the country like locusts.
I think there is a lot of anti-science feeling, a kind of reaction against the sort of privileged position that science and scientists have had. There’s also a kind of know-nothingism — “Gee, this is hard, it makes my head hurt, why should I have to make my head hurt? It must be because these guys don’t know as much as they think they do.” Multiculturalists, feminists and others who are in many cases rightly resentful of the position of white men in our society, sometimes reject science in the process of rejecting the dominance of white men. That’s a mistake.
And there’s greed. In the breast implant case, there was a lot of money, and there still is — billions at stake.
You describe it as a case of “follow the money.”
That’s right.
Quote of the day
Well, it’s better than Perot
I have founded my own political party in Serbia. The Party of Ordinary Drunkards. We believe all people should be allowed to drink in peace and all taxes on alcohol and tobacco abolished.
– 44-year-old Serbian rock star Bora Djordjevic, the “Bob Dylan of the Serbian protest movement.” (From “Rocker’s Raucous Role: Jeer Leader for Serbia” in the Friday, January 17 New York Times)
Monday, Sep 23, 1996 7:00 PM UTC
Terry McMillan is flying high -- and if you don't like it, get off of her cloud.
By Ros Davidson
Terry McMillan
is on a roll. The 44-year-old writer’s “Waiting to Exhale” sold nearly 4 million copies, while last winter’s film version surprised the industry by taking in $67 million. Her latest book, “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” published this spring, had a first printing of 800,000 copies in hardcover, numbers unheard of for a black novelist, and has been on the New York Times best-seller list for 19 weeks. McMillan is currently working on the screenplay for 20th Century Fox, which bought the rights for an undisclosed seven-figure sum and hopes to release the film by Christmas 1997. And she crowed to a conference of black writers that she now commands $6 million for a book.
McMillan’s popularity extends to her personal appearances in big-city bookstores, which are mobbed by crowds mostly made up of 30-year-old-and-up black women. She often draws bigger crowds than the other reigning grand dames of black letters, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.
McMillan spoke to Salon, first over lunch at San Francisco’s chic Postrio restaurant, and a few days later by telephone from her home in nearby Danville, where she was resting between an unexpected trip to Los Angeles and a long-planned 10-day book tour of the United Kingdom and South Africa to promote “Stella.” McMillan shares her Danville home with her 12-year-old only son Solomon, her much-discussed 22-year-old Jamaican boyfriend Jonathan Plummer, whom she met and fell in love with last year on vacation at a resort in Negril, Jamaica, 13 birds (“Jonathan loves birds”), a calico cat and a black labrador.
Not coincidentally, “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” is about a 42-year-old divorced career woman and single mother who meets a young Jamaican, has a passionate affair…and finds freedom.
Contrary to her image of abrasiveness, in person McMillan came across as thoughtful, profane, damned funny and reflexively self-revealing. She talked about her relationship with Jonathan (“He wants to marry me, but he’s so young and I’m cynical. But in the last couple of days I’ve been wondering…”) and impulsively revealed that she recently had her breasts lifted (“I’m coming into the room, but my breasts is coming first,” she joked.)
McMillan says she’s still in love and that her friends tell her she seems happier than she’s been in ages.
“Part of it is I changed my hair. Whenever you put your hair up it gives you a face-lift,” she says self-deprecatingly. “Hell, who knows how long the look will last.”
You’d had a writing block for some time, I believe, before you started “Stella.” Why was that? And you’d put aside a book you were writing, “A Day Late and a Dollar Short.”
I just couldn’t write after my mother died (in September 1993). I just closed up shop.
Wasn’t “A Day Late and a Dollar Short” somewhat about your mother?
There probably will be aspects of her in it. At the time I had to stop working on it. It was going to take me some place I didn’t want to go emotionally.
And “Stella?”
It started as a poem, just nine pages. I just started writing it as a poem to Jonathan to let him know how I felt. But it just grew and grew I was making stuff up, exaggerating it. That’s the great thing about fiction, you can step ouside youself and look in and see more about why we met and fell in love. Not that it’s that autobiographical. He’s not half as talkative as Winston is in “Stella.” And the love-making — I wouldn’t dare put all my shit in about that.
Jonathan did read the bit about love-making and he said, “Was I such a good kisser?” and I said, “You were far better than that.”
But it was a poem that read like a book. Jonathan really encouraged that. It’s always exciting when you have something propelling you. So the story became a novella, an Algonquin story, a Chapel Hill, then I was up to page 350!
Why were you in Jamaica? Because you couldn’t write? I think you’ve said it was for “psychic renewal.”
I decided I would do something for me. So I went down there and basically it was wonderful — the water and the sky. I was just going to read and work out, but I also ended up having fun. I danced my brains out, then I met Jonathan, and like Stella I didn’t take him seriously. I couldn’t believe I actually liked someone his age, although of course men do it all the time. So I said, Why not? What’s wrong with this? He didn’t see anything wrong with it.
But I just saw it as a fling. I’d never done it before. It wasn’t just sex though — he’s not Marlon Brando. He’s really young. But he’s so poised and he didn’t know who I was and he didn’t care. It wasn’t until months later that Jonathan said, “Guess what, my sister has read your book!”
Then what happened after you’d returned to the U.S.?
All my girlfriends said, send him a fucking ticket! I was so happy to be writing, so grateful to him for whatever he had done to me… and my mom, I really believe she was on that beach in Jamaica.
I have to ask — how old is Jonathan?
He’s 22. Oh, but don’t tell anybody I said that. My friends all think he’s 23. He’s not. He’s 22.
Is he friends with your son Solomon who’s, what, 12 years old now?
Oh yes. They wear each other’s T-shirts, they beat each other up, they laugh at each other’s penises — not that they’ve ever seen each other’s penises.
Was it tough being a single mother and getting a writing career off the ground?
It wasn’t that hard when I think about it. I just did what I had to do. Shit, look at what they’re doing in Bosnia.
Not hard at all?
Well, some people find everything hard, but I never saw my child as an inconvenience. He’s almost 13 now, and since he was two and a half he’s seen his Mom typing at the typewriter.
You’ve talked in the past about a backlash against your success. Can you say more about that?
There is a price for popularity. Critics look for your weaknesses, your flaws, anything that makes the work seem like a fluke and not seem worthy of all the attention it’s getting.
“Stella’s” been criticized for being autobiographical. Time magazine panned it for that.
Few writers are willing to admit writing is autobiographical. It’s a fear they won’t be seen as original. It really pisses me off. It’s bullshit. I mean that motherfucker from Time, he just wanted to say I hadn’t written a novel, which I resent. If I ever see him again…If I’d known what he was going to do, I would have never let him in the door.
My mama used to say, “Always have a thick skin as people are going to talk about you if you do and talk about you if you don’t.” So fuck ‘em.
Do critics tend to see you through a prism of gender and race?
Well, they come into play. I mean, everyone’s trying to work out what women should think and do. You know, they say it’s a pity that Stella doesn’t have more self-esteem, which really misses the point. Then some women think, “Right on, go for it girl” when she meets Winston. And others think, “Gee whiz, she’s having a mid-life crisis just like me.” I don’t think so! That’s also missing the point.
But my fans are my biggest critics, my best critics. A lot of women get empowered by my work, so fuck the critics. I’m not writing books to please critics. If I were I’d be writing like Virginia Woolf or Jane Austen (she cackles)… she’s so popular now!
Who has influenced you as a writer? I know you’ve mentioned Ring Lardner, the sportswriter who first came to your attention in “Catcher in the Rye.”
Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison.
Anyone else?
You mean black writers?
Any writers.
James Baldwin and Langston Hughes.
Who do you most like to read?
A lot of the people that I just named…. Katherine Anne Porter, J.D. Salinger, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a lot of those folks. A little Hemingway. Just a little Hemingway. As far as my contemporaries — Jane Hamilton, Jessica Hagedorn. I try to read a lot of new writers.
Are there any in the new crop of young black writers who particularly impress you?
Yes, Chris Farley. (“My Favorite War.”) He’s really good. And Diane McKinney-Whetstone, who wrote “Tumbling.”
Are there any you feel you’ve particularly influenced?
Well, there are quite a few of them from what I can tell but I don’t want to name them right now.
Do you see yourself primarily as a writer, a black writer, a black woman writer…?
All of them. You can’t separate one from the other in my case. And it doesn’t bother me if you refer to me as a black writer, because that’s what I am. I don’t have a problem with it.
Tuesday, Sep 17, 1996 10:21 AM UTC
By Ros Davidson
he’s back, and this time he might have more difficulty getting off scot-free. The retrial of O.J. Simpson, which began today in a Santa Monica courtroom, takes place under very different circumstances than the previous go-around. The wrongful death suit filed by the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman — if successful — won’t put O.J. Simpson in jail, but it could cost him a great deal of money. The civil (in the legal sense) proceedings also have, apart from Simpson, an entirely different cast of lawyers. The public will not be glued to the television for the next several months because cameras are not being allowed in the courtroom.
What other differences are there? And what are some of the high points to look for?
We talked to Peter Arenella, a professor of law at the UCLA Law School, who was a legal consultant for ABC News during Simpson’s criminal trial.
Judge Hiroshi Fujisaki, who is presiding over this trial, has been widely praised for imposing a pretty strict gag order on the participants, in order to prevent, he says, a “circus atmosphere.” Will it?
Not very much, despite the judge’s hopes. The gag order is
really at this point a useless act because the public in this
jury pool has been exposed to so much information about the Simpson
case it’s hard to believe that any further exposure can really
change someone’s opinions. The question is really whether members
of the jury pool can really have an open mind about Simpson’s
guilt or innocence. It’s going to be terribly hard, if people are
honest, to find 12 intelligent people who have an open mind.
He clearly wants to limit media involvement, and is even excluding sketch artists
from the courtroom.
That’s one example of how superfluous and silly parts of this gag order are. Also, there really is not much purpose in excluding family
members from talking to the media. Everyone knows what
Ronald Goldman’s father’s position is, so the notion that he needs
to be gagged or that other family members need to be gagged to
promote a fair trial is silly. Gagging the attorneys certainly
prevents them from doing their daily spins after court
to the news media and arguably there is some purpose served by
that. But these attorneys will manage to get their own spins out
there somehow through other actors.
There are completely different sets of attorneys this time. What difference might that make?
They were not evenly matched last time. It wasn’t even a close call. The
“Dream Team” was a ridiculous appellation created by the media to
describe the defense team; but the truth is there were some
members of that team — I’m thinking specifically of Barry Scheck
and Johnnie Cochran — who on occasion were quite skilled at what
they did.
But not so the prosecution?
Christopher Darden on many occasions acted less like a trial
lawyer than someone who had such a strong emotional stake in the
setting that he couldn’t act professionally: irritability, mood
swings, petulance. There were so many examples of behavior that
a good courtroom trial lawyer does not engage in. He also allowed
himself to be baited constantly by Johnnie Cochran, which never
served the interests of the prosecution.
Marcia Clark is a better trial lawyer than Christopher Darden but she had a tough time
seeing the nuances of some issues. She certainly believed and
held onto the belief that African-American women would be good
jurors for her, despite the advice of a jury consultant who made
it quite clear that they would be the worst possible. She ignored that advice to her detriment.
We’re not likely to see a repeat of those mistakes — on either side?
By reputation there appears to be a more even match this time. I do
know Dan Petrocelli who represents the Goldmans;
he is a superb trial lawyer. Robert Baker, who is
representing Simpson, has a reputation as a superb trial
lawyer, so at least in theory they should be evenly matched.
What do you think will be the high points of the trial?
That’s impossible to say, apart from O.J. taking the stand. Other than that, it’s
impossible to predict. It’s like predicting how a play is going
to go before you’ve seen the actors do their parts. You can
know the entire script and not know if the play will work or not
until you see its performance. And a trial is very much a piece of
theater. What looks good in deposition might look very bad on the
witness stand because the person delivering the words does not
seem credible to the jurors.
If you were representing the Goldmans and the Browns, how would you tackle
O.J. on the stand? You’re a former defense lawyer —
I’m a former criminal defense lawyer and I don’t want to give
any advice to Dan Petrocelli as he knows all too well how to
handle Simpson. His greatest vulnerability so far has
been how he’s handled the domestic violence evidence. And with all the coaching in the
world, if this judge allows in a considerable amount of domestic
violence evidence, I believe that Simpson’s vulnerability in
how he responds to those allegations will be one of the places where the plaintiffs’ attorneys can do some very good work.
How long will this trial last? We’ve heard speculation that it would take four months.
There’s no way of knowing. Judge Ito, in his admonitions to the jurors about how long
they would be sequestered, thought the criminal trial would end by February (1995).
Well, he was off by only about 4 or 5 months. The only thing that can be said with reasonable confidence is that it probably will not last half as long as the criminal case. That means it could last as long as 4 or 5 months.
Given that we’re not going to have gavel-to-gavel TV
broadcasts from inside the courtroom, who do you think might provide the best overall coverage of the trial?
Court TV has legal commentators on staff who are well
trained and versed in the law and who understand what it is they
are covering, and they also have experts whom they invite on a
rotating basis. You don’t simply get the same pundit giving that
person’s particular slant all the time. So I think that Court TV
will be by far the best place to look.
There have been several books published on the criminal trial, including by attorneys from both sides. Which one has been the best so far?
I think there are two that are worthy of people’s
attention. One of the defense lawyers, Gerald Uelman, wrote an excellent book called “O.J. Lessons.” Though he was offering a defense perspective on several issues, Uelmen has been on all sides of the fence — a prosecutor, a defense lawyer and a legal academic. He has a very rich view of the different roles involved and he’s a very smart man and very funny. The one good book written at this juncture by someone who wasn’t involved directly in the case is Jeffrey Toobin’s (“The Run Of His Life”) You’re not going to find out much that’s new, but it’s certainly a well-written,
careful book and it offers some rather caustic assessments of
some of the key actors.
One last question — what do you think the outcome of the civil
trial will be?
Any legal commentator who answers a question like that
is not acting in an ethical fashion. You’re free to ask it, but
for someone to answer that question is for someone to go beyond
their legal expertise and engage in crystal-ball gazing. I don’t know how Simpson will perform on the stand. I have some expectations about what will happen when he is
challenged by the plaintiff’s attorneys, but I might be wrong.
Expectations?
I think Simpson will be vulnerable in dealing
with the domestic violence evidence that will be admitted in this
case. That doesn’t answer the key question, which
is that even if he is somewhat vulnerable here, will his testimony
surrounding the night of the killings nevertheless be credible?
He’s going to face a difficult examination by the plaintiffs’ attorneys on that.
Unless the jury finds him to be totally disingenuous on the
domestic violence evidence — and therefore rejects his credibility totally — it remains to be seen how he handles it.
Quote of the day
Man of the Year
“Let me put it this way. I don’t believe there’s a man outside of maybe Billy Graham, or whatever, that has gotten more love from America…I mean now.”
– O.J. Simpson. (From “Simpson Unbowed On Trial Eve,” in the Boston Globe)
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Ros Davidson
