It is, of course, the Tonya Harding story that has most recently been the object of this classic swing-around. Just when it started to get really interesting, we were informed by the hall monitors of our public life that our fascination with it was disgusting. I don’t think so. I think that, as is so often true of the conflicts, crimes, scandals and other assorted astonishments that consume national attention for a time, this particular saga touches much that is important and a bit that is downright primal in our lives, and that it also provides some insights into the state of our peculiar contemporary moral universe.
To me the key fact of that moral universe is the busted connection between what we say we think and what we evidently do think. Consider it: you’ll never hear more stern, punishing, puritanical talk about family values and the necessity of taking a firm stand against crime; and yet you’ll never see a time in which more egregious misconduct is excused or extenuated away by juries, and applauded away by daytime-TV Phil-and-Oprah audiences who are positively yearning, as it seems, to forgive and buck up the father who committed incest with his toddler child, or the sexpot man who ran off with her teenaged daughter’s boyfriend. The Menedez brothers, who shot their parents dead, spent much time at their trials elaborating on what they claimed was systematic sexual abuse by their father, and complained that their mother did nothing to intervene. Can anyone doubt that if such abuse did occur and if the parents, while they lived, had been convincingly charged with it, they would have, in their own turn, suggested that they had been abused as children themselves? Or, at least suggested they had both come from a barren, loveless home environment?
We used to like to point out how children raised by cold parents or no parents or indifferent guardians grew up to be Winston Churchill and Eleanor Roosevelt. That was, no doubt, heartless in its own way and also statistically misleading. More kids surely were deformed and defeated by such early deprivation than managed to triumph over it. But now we find such deprivation everywhere and, worse, we pronounce early hardship or even less than an idealized, Norman Rockwell-style family-life reason to expect and accept all manner of moral shortcomings. It is a very patronizing, seigneurial way of looking at things, the Lord of the Manor explaining that you just can’t hold this riffraff to any kind of standards. That has certainly been a theme in play in the Tonya Harding story.
The other side of this theme has been a kind of exasperated boredom with and even suspicion of Harding’s competitor, the good girl Nancy Kerrigan. Social critics complain these days – and with reason – that there has been a terrific revision downward, if not entirely into oblivion, of the idea of guilt. There is none, they say; there are only unfortunate conditions that compel bad things to happen. Well, that’s old hat. “What I think is interesting is what has happened to the idea of innocence. Innocence, too, has been revised more or less out of existence. At the very least it is suspect. More than our literature has been “deconstructed” by the critics. Our system of moral assumptions has been too. Nice people, clean-cut people, smiling 9-to-5 and church on-Sunday people, the ideal girl (as she used to be known in high-school yearbooks), the boy who mows the neighbor’s lawn – hey, you’ve got to believe there’s an ax murderer down there somewhere, or, at a minimum, a severely repressed person or a hypocrite or an egomaniac or something. In any case, they are not the ones who engage our minds or, to some extent, even our sympathy. Boring, we say. Bring on the troublemaker.
Before anyone got the idea that little girls should want to grow up to be running backs and tank-corps commanders, millions of small female klutzes hopelessly fantasized lives as ballet dancers and, yes, figure skaters. The Harding-Kerrigan competition plays to that, and it also stirs residual memories of the fairy tales and girls’ books and comics and movies in which intended role models were allowed a little mischief, but not the kind for which you need an attorney. We peer at these two oddly folkloric figures, one in white and one in black, through our blurred lens of disrupted memory; we aren’t yet through with or rid of the old moral scheme of things, but we are, somehow, part way to a different one – more sophisticated, some would say, and others, more permissive and corrupt.
People become enraged in their arguments over this. Harding is seen by her supporters as having been convicted without a trial and misused by her ex-husband, her family and, more or less, life. This reading manages to ignore the fact that she has already admitted grievous wrongdoing in covering up the crime. Her critics are fearful that she will get away with it, that if pressed she will invoke the now familiar abuse defense. This infuriates them. We are, thus, in our physically far-flung, yet electronically conjoined way, functioning more or less as one of those muddled modern juries that are themselves so unsatisfactory and maddening. I write before they have competed in Lillehammer and am prepared to say that the suspense concerning the outcome dwarfs anything I have seen since the worldwide frenzy to know who shot J. R. I share the interest, but believe the skating outcome won’t solve anything for our jury. I’m a juror who would have kept Harding off the team. My interest is fully engaged when others take me on on this. We are having a moral wrestle. I don’t see why we should apologize for that. Count on it: those other issues weren’t going to get resolved in the interim anyway.
