Exculpations Crybabies: Eternal Victims

Some folks just can't get along. There, in a grocery store in suburban Portland, Ore., was cashier Tom Morgan, more or less minding his own business. And there also was cashier Randy Maresh, who seemed to delight in tormenting Morgan. At length Morgan got fed up, hired a lawyer and sued Maresh for $100,000 in damages. The complaint: Maresh "willfully and maliciously inflicted severe mental stress and humiliation . . . by continually, intentionally and repeatedly passing gas directed at the plaintiff." Not only that: Maresh would "hold it and walk funny to get to me" before expressing himself.

The defense countered with the argument that breaking wind is a form of free speech, and that the right to flatulence was protected, in theory if not in so many words, by the First Amendment. After listening patiently to both sides, the judge concluded that the unusual form of aggressive expression was "juvenile and boorish," but he could find no Oregon law prohibiting it. Case dismissed.

That happened in 1987, and the tide of petty American litigiousness has kept on rising to new, absurd heights. This is the age of the self-tort crybaby, to whom some disappointment -- a slur, the loss of a job, an errant spouse, a foul-tasting can of beer, a slip on the supermarket floor, an unbecoming face- lift -- is sufficient occasion to claim huge monetary awards.

It is also the age of the all-purpose victim: the individual or group whose plight, condition or even momentary setback is not a matter that needs be solved by individual effort but constitutes a social problem in itself. "We're not to blame, we're victims" is the increasingly assertive rallying cry of groups who see the American dream not as striving fulfilled but as unachieved entitlement. Crybabyhood is all blame, no pain, for gain. And all too often it works.

The law courts are only one of the crybaby's many avenues of complaint; there is the street, the pulpit, the press. Public officials, writers, children in school -- all nowadays hide behind euphemisms that are often silly, not to say condescending, lest they be castigated by the crybaby for even the most inadvertent slip or imagined insult to this race or that ethnic group. They are fleeing, in other words, before the crybaby's greatest talent: the ability to hand out guilt, frequently entangled in the sacred American discourse on rights. If drunk drivers get into trouble, they have the right to blame their bar owners, and in most states that right is backed up by law. If black moviemaker Spike Lee fails to win first prize at the Cannes Film Festival for his Do the Right Thing, the reason is not that the judges deemed sex, lies and videotape the best movie; the reason is racism.

So widespread is this sort of disaffection, says author John Taylor in a sizzling New York magazine article, that a double-barreled social phenomenon now threatens the real exercise of civil liberties. The first barrel is "victimology." The other is what George Washington University sociologist Amitai Etzioni calls the "rights industry" -- the creation by individuals and special-interest groups of freshly minted freedoms and prerogatives that must be upheld even when they are foolishly asserted, and whose transgression is -- always -- a matter for outcry.