The Squeal Rule

The only time I can remember my wife ever taking a hairbrush and whacking her daughter with the hard back of it was when the said daughter had tattled or squealed on her brother. She was one astounded little girl, I can tell you! But the lesson went home and, in our family, the rule stayed firm. One unforgivable crime was tattling, squealing, telling tales.

This famous and unique incident occurred to me when our papers started to write about what is called 'the Squeal Rule'. It's a proposal of a government department that has to do with health and human services, that whenever minors – not coal miners, but under-age humans – go to a government clinic and are supplied with a contraceptive device, the clinic must then notify the parents. Not before the Pill or the device has been given, but afterwards.

Well, this proposal, and that's all it is until Congress acts on it, it's caused what the serious papers call 'a national debate' and what the rest of us call a hullabaloo. The uproar comes from opponents of the idea who say that it's an unwarranted intrusion on human privacy. They add that the knowledge of, say, a 15-year-old girl that her parents knew what she was up to would scare her off the clinic and lead to either pregnancy or abortion. The people who support the idea say that the sex life of a minor is certainly the parents' concern and that if they're ignored, the new rule would amount to the state taking over from the parent and doing it with dollars contributed by the taxpayers. They add that the new rule would lead to more pregnancies and abortions from children who would fumble the devices. Neither side has enough figures to prove their point about these hazards.

I think the best way of solving this problem and it's what most women, I believe, would do instinctively, is to ask how you would feel if it applied to your own daughter or son. The noisier argument of the opponents is that the sex life of their 10, 12, 16-year-old is its own business, just like its choice of friends or what game to play. The supporters of the proposal say that parents are assumed to be the curators not so much of the private life of a minor, as the curator of its values, that the parents are the first to be told if a child steals, takes drugs, even skips school.

And I have to say at the end of this objective report that I, myself, am very much on the side of the proposal. It may be uncomfortable for parents to know about hanky-panky leading to an unexpected or unwanted child, but when the child or the abortion becomes the first order of business, it's surely family business and not being allowed to know about it is as bad as ignoring it. In other words, the parents are forgoing not a right, but their duty in any society to help, to suggest, to guide.

I brought this up though because of the vivid little catchphrase that has christened it and which obviously is going to be effective in fighting the proposal. The Squeal Rule says, in three words, that the government – of all bullying outsiders – is going to squeal on your child. William Safire, the New York Times commentator who doubles once a week in a fascinating column about language, its uses and abuses, has neatly expressed the power and danger of this catchword by saying that whenever a vivid bit of slang sums up a controversy, one side seems to grab the moral high-ground by the coining of a phrase.

This controversy reminds me, by the way, of second thoughts that the Russians are having – I must say it's rather late in the day – about the institution of children's day-care centres. If the Russians didn't invent it, they were certainly the first wholesale practitioners of it and I remember way back in the days when people like Lady Astor and Bernard Shaw were visiting the new Utopia and reporting ecstatically about it, it did seem to a lot of us young onlookers as one of the more sensible and responsible developments of socialism. It's been adopted far and wide and something of the sort is clearly a pressing need in the society of today where nearly one wife in two is a working wife, whereas it used to be, 40 years ago, one in five.

Well, in other countries than Russia, disturbing figures are showing up not so much of juvenile delinquency, which can most often come from no care at all, but of emotional troubles in the adults who were the beneficiaries, as we always thought, of daycare by someone other than their parents. It's a tricky business this and one not to be dogmatic about, especially in a time when the Freudian or post-Freudian theory – that the parents were almost solely responsible for the way their children turned out – has been challenged by our knowledge and our ignorance of genes, chromosomes and the like.

All I'll say now is that in talking over some of these problems with a youngish man, just 40 but a survivor of the generation that was in the thick of the protest movements and the drug culture of the 1960s. He said something that I see to be true when I look around at good friends of mine whose children, now in their thirties, are weak sisters or zombies or mind-blown hangers-on or sad and sensitive layabouts. He said in all the kids I knew in college, I've never known one with a drug problem who had a good, close relation with their parents.

Well, I'm back to thinking about the power of a catchword to grab Mr Safire's high moral ground. We've had, for several years now, another national debate going on about something called 'the right to work'. Several states have drafted or passed or tried to enforce right to work laws. Well, surely, everybody has a right to work but this law is attractively and woefully misnamed. What it means is the right not to join a union and you don't have to mooch for long around industrial cities in any company town or any other town whose basic industry – coal, steel, automobiles – has made it thoroughly organised, to discover pretty quickly that any brave soul asserting his right not to join a union is asserting, rather, the privilege of joining the unemployed.

And now we have the famous 'nuclear freeze'. It's catchier than 'zero option'. It asks us whether we'd like to have the superpowers freeze their nuclear arsenals. Well, who would want to say no? What the phrase, the slogan does not say, is to freeze what, when and at what levels.

There's another attractive word with a bad meaning – a word revived from the heyday of Roosevelt's New Deal – a word with which the Republicans used to lambaste Roosevelt for spending public money on what they took to be unnecessary invented jobs. It's an old word whose origins are hidden somewhere in the Southern mountains of the pioneer experience. It's the word 'boondoggle'. When Roosevelt took a couple of million unemployed boys off the streets and set them planting trees or mending bridges in an outfit he called 'the civilian conservation corps' that was called a boondoggle and now the word's come back.

President Reagan, looking at the stubborn unemployment figures which will not go away or improve is thinking of reviving something like Roosevelt's conservation corps. Reagan's problem is to find some other word than boondoggle, a word with a nice sound, a word that sings of bravery and free enterprise.

I was... I was going to start this talk with a phrase that certainly does not sing and I was afraid if I used it right away the night air or the breakfast tables would jiggle with the sound of sets being clicked off. What could be more dreary, except to the people engaged in it, than the phrase 'market research' ?

Well, what I've come across is market research of a canny and even comical kind. It's certainly something new in the motion-picture business. In the old days, the big, awesome producers were the ones who could sense in their bones and were right about the sort of movie the people would flock to. Now, however, there's a research group that's been employed to tap the pulses of the people – old, young, white, black, every sort – to find out ahead of time what sort of movies they'd like to flock to. The group has had a great deal of success. It stopped, just in time, one studio making an epic about D-Day, the allied invasion of Normandy, when it discovered that most Americans under and crowding 20, the biggest movie audience, thought the invasion of Normandy had something to do with the Norman Conquest.

So far I hear the group has had one crashing failure, a failure of prophecy. It warned a big studio off making a picture because of its title and subject matter. The word 'wars', it said, is fatal and a film about robots will empty the theatres in droves, as Sam Goldwyn said. The company thought again and stayed with the risk. Result, the $500-million grosser, 'Star Wars'.

Another bit of market research that fills me with amazement and, I must say, a twinge of sadness, was done for the television networks and their sponsors to help them decide which sports they ought to televise. The main shock is the staggering news that only four per cent of the American population does not play or read about or watch some form of sport. The two socko attractions are American football, 39 per cent and baseball, 28 per cent. After them, in descending order of attraction come basketball on the heels or the fingertips of baseball, then boxing, gymnastics, swimming, ice skating, horse racing, tennis, athletics, skiing, motor racing, marathons, wrestling and bowling. Way at the bottom, soccer, jai alai and – wait for it – lacrosse.

There is one other game, very close to the bottom, a bare five per cent of the population ever watches it. It is called golf. Only six per cent play it. It can only mean to me that America is full of self-conscious or pompous or over-proud people who can't bear the thought of going out on Saturdays and Sundays and making fools of themselves in the silent presence of their friends.

It's the silence that hurts.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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