Daily News, Sunday, April 17, 1994

One of the prerequisites that comes with living in a big city in the closing years of the 20th century is that you get to feel incomparably superior and sophisticated to all those people who lived in small towns a generation or a century ago.

Unfortunately, most of this alleged sophistication exists mainly in our own minds. On the big issues, this town is as about as sophisticated as a little village in the Black Forest in the middle of the Dark Ages - we run on rumor and superstition, believe astonishing things that aren't true, and base public policy on what can only be described as mass delusion.

Now most of the time it's no big deal if we choose to believe that standing in front of your microwave oven gives you cataracts, cellular phones cause brain cancer, jabbing the channel-changer at the TV makes it work better and the spotted owl is an endangered species. But every once in a while, a big delusion comes along, takes over and drives us completely around the bend for the next two years. Not surprisingly, perhaps, these delusions almost invariably are the ones that have to do with sex.

Consider for instance the mass delirium of the McMartin Preschool molestation controversy. McMartin, you may recall, was that little Manhattan Beach preschool accused back in 1983 of being the center of a vast Satanic/porno/molestation ring. When news of this erupted, parents, public officials and media almost went crazy over the accusations. I talked to one father who told me that the other parents had put together a slush fund and, if any of the defendants weren't convicted, they were going to hire a hitman to take them out themselves.

Police and prosecutors were holding breathless press conferences, each outdoing the other in trying to show how uncompromisingly ruthless they intended to be in stamping out this cancer in our midst. And it truly was a cancer. At one point, eight other preschools had been identified as satellite molestation sites and 80 different people had been unofficially named as suspected molesters and/or witches.

As you might imagine, the media were having a field day, airing the most sensational and, as events subsequently proved, literally incredible charges even before the defense attorneys even knew what their clients were being charged with.

Six years later, after two of the longest and most expensive trials in history, none of the defendants were convicted of anything, a development which should have been predicted right from the start if anyone in a position of authority had taken a hard look at what the kids were purportedly saying to their therapist/interpreters.

I mean, did anyone who didn't have a prior history of involuntary institutionalization really believe that for years on end that kids had been whisked out of their classrooms, taken to motels to be molested by millionaire perverts who had flown into town via a Lear jet for the occasion, and then, before anyone noticed, returned to the sandbox where they would be waiting contentedly with their tin pails and toy shovels when their smiling parents drove up that afternoon? It surely didn't take a deductive genius to realize that the kids in many cases were saying some truly astonishing things, claiming they were molested in speedboats, in hot-air balloons, in carwashes and on the altars of local churches (where they also saw babies dismembered). Among other things, they claimed they saw horses killed with swords; saw coffins dug up, opened up and children put inside with dead bodies; then the woman who started the whole frenzy by claiming that her son had been molested at McMartin, also later claimed that an AWOL Marine sodomized the family dog as well.

Not only did this not raise an eyebrow with most of the reporters covering the case, they rather took the attitude that the McMartin revelations were so awful they had to be true. How's that for logic, for going strictly by the evidence? It was almost as if people had a need to believe the charges, and the worse they were the more they loved it.

I remember once telling a dear old friend with a young daughter that some of the charges were simply too incredible to be true and she snapped aat me -- "You want child molesters to go free?"

I didn't get it then and I still don't get it now. You'd turn on the TV and there would be some passionate child advocate/therapist telling the camera with a tear in her eye and a catch in her throat, "We have to believe the children! They don't lie about things like this."

Well, I don't know why anyone would think that. In 1692, teen-age girls in Salem, Mass., claimed they saw old women change themselves into cats and dance naked with the devil by the light of the full moon. Were these kids telling the truth, too?

Once, in the middle of the whole McMartin mess, I had dinner with a political activist/documentary filmmaker who was doing programs about the controversy for public TV. At one point, I asked if he had any reason to doubt that the accusations were true.

"If I did," he snapped, "I wouldn't tell you."

Slowly it began to dawn on me. People weren't rationally weighing the evidence here and making reasoned judgments. They wanted the charges to be true. They had an agenda - "What else did you expect was going to happen with Reagan in the White House slashing child care left and right?"

But it wasn't just intellectually crude political activists who swallowed McMartin whole. Normally skeptical reporters felt that if they pressed too hard on the obvious fantasies, inconsistencies and contradictions in the children's stories, it would somehow damage a larger and infinitely more important cause - the ongoing effort that started back in the '60s to demonstrate on every occasion that America itself was rotten to the core.

Intellectuals have never much liked America. Unlike all those Eastern European socialist countries which needed an intellectual class to set quotas, allocate resources, oversee production, and otherwise run everyone's lives and the economy too, in America the market performed that function by itself, automatically. Intellectuals consequently were marginalized, unnecessary, without any real hands-on power. No wonder they flocked to the universities. Unlike the real world, there was no penalty for failure there.

There were two other characteristics of intellectuals that set them apart from the common man - they tended not to believe in God, and to them the American family was the principle source of social pathology in the country, not the average person's primary joy, principle solace and main bulwark against the ever-encroaching power of the state.

This is one reason intellectuals are so prone to mass-delusion today. Having given up an irrational faith in God, they substitute instead an irrational faith in government, which goes a long way toward explaining (to recall an old example) why the national media was so panicked the day that Reagan was shot.

The national media certainly weren't panicked because they loved and respected Reagan (in fact, they despised him as a man). Even so, all their adult lives they'd operated on the metaphor that the country was a 747 and the president was the pilot. That's why they kept demanding of poor jittery Al Haig, "Who's minding the store?" They thought if the president was shot the country would crash and burn unless someone was at the controls.

Well, I can assure you that I for one didn't feel the slightest bit jittery when Reagan was shot. And neither did the average American either. He probably just muttered, "Gee, too bad," and switched to the bass-fishing channel.

Contrary to what so many reporters assume, the average person doesn't care that much about the president - he'd be more than happy if the president would just go his way, do his thing and, like the British monarchy, leave everyone else alone. I always sort of sigh when I read yet another novel in which the author confides how much he grieved the day John F. Kennedy died. I've even seen stories in which boy meets girl, drink coffee for hours in a neighborhood cafe, exchange tender confidences about their pain over the assassination and then, having established their extraordinary compatibility, rush back to his apartment and make deep all-consuming love.

I was sorry Kennedy was killed, sorry for his two children and sorry for what the assassination said about violence in our country. But I wasn't devastated. He wasn't my father. I didn't look to him for style or moral guidance. And I certainly hadn't pinned any of my hopes on his making the country a better place.

But that's the difference between intellectuals and the rest of us. They want to use the power of the presidency to remake the American character. And it bugs the hell out of them that, so far, churches and intact families are standing in the way.