Family Values

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There is a road that runs from the land of the Ik to the dog track in Idaho.

The Ik were the mountain people the anthropologist Colin Turnbull found in northern Uganda some years ago. They were going hungry and mistreating one another in horrible ways.

The Ik were as hideous as family values can get. Adults would sit around the $ fire and think it was uproarious when a baby toddled toward the flames. Children would excavate food from the mouths of weakened grandparents and run away laughing. A wife would die by the roadside, and her husband would walk on without looking back, relieved to be rid of the burden.

The anxiety behind the phrase "family values" may derive from an intimation of such breakdown, a flicker of the instant when the moral slippery slope may swivel like a trapdoor to right angles. Americans see the inner Ik all the time these days. They glimpsed it out of the corner of the eye for a moment when an 82-year-old man with Alzheimer's disease was abandoned at the dog track in Post Falls, Idaho, last March. A cautionary scene -- and it turned into a morning talk-show joke: "It's dog-track time for you, doofus!" the host with hyena cackle, whooping and snorting, tells someone. The sense of the Ik within American society, an uncaring, a messy, stupid license gone out of control, gives some plausibility to Republican rhetoric on the subject.

Some people detected a heavy dose last week in the tabloid drama involving Woody Allen and Mia Farrow's adopted daughter.

Anyway, the motif of family values kept recurring along the Ik-Idaho Road. The Republicans conjured it up and turned it to powerful political effect. Their show in Houston was gaudy and complex -- a hellfire tent meeting dissolving to a '50s television sitcom with flags and confetti and sometimes tinny modulations.

The family-values part of the Republican production was, as they kept saying of Bill Clinton, relentlessly slick. It depended on a sort of grieving, part- nostalgic assumption that Americans live amid unwholesome aliens (homosexual teachers who want to proselytize, condom distributors, abortion-mongers, she-devil lawyers named Hillary) in a postlapsarian age, after some immense moral fall (whenever or whatever that may have been), something that has gone hugely wrong in American life.

It is far from a new theme in U.S. history. In 1971 a young White House speechwriter, Patrick J. Buchanan, wrote a memo to President Richard Nixon suggesting that the theme be used as a weapon. His campaign strategy: cut the country and Democratic Party in half, and pick off "far the larger half." The Republicans told America that George McGovern meant "acid, abortion and amnesty." Nixon's "half" in the 1972 election was a landslide.