|
|
A New-Age Crystal Ball Gazer Looks at the Future of Crime
| Article
# : |
12463 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1987 |
1,497 Words |
| Author
: |
Herbert London
|
CRIME WARPS
The Future of Crime in America
Georgette Bennett
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1987
435 pp., $19.95
Most books represent an author's bias. Some books are simply a statement of prejudice. Others conceal bias through an artful collection of anecdotes that in the aggregate reinforce a point of view. And still others contain postulates unsupported by hard data that belong in the realm of speculation. Crime Warps: The Future of Crime in America by Georgette Bennett is a combination of all these books.
Bennett has "studied" at the John Naisbitt school of speculation. Its central maxim is, if you're going to guess, guess often. Many guess are better than a few guesses, since once in a while you may hit the mark. Bennett does indeed hit the mark on occasion. However, she misses the mark most of the time due to faulty extrapolations, wrong-headed assumptions, and a reliance on questionable data.
Like Naisbitt, Bennett has a penchant for adorning the obvious with the profundity of a future projection - take for example, "crime warp." But rarely does she lose sight of her bias. Jerry Falwell is portrayed as an ideologue attempting to impose his brand of morality on the nation, while Ira Glaser is a representative of the ACLU trying to protect the rights of minorities. Is it any wonder that Governor Cuomo described this book as "insightful and intelligent"?
Bennett wishes to encourage a new-age interpretation of the Bill of Rights. According to Bennett - in what is unquestionably a central point - many Americans believe a breakdown in morality is responsible for an increase in lawlessness. This point as stated is unobjectionable - it squares with most polls. But then comes the fillip: "In exchange for a moral renaissance, large segments of the population are willing to compromise vital parts of the Bill of Rights" (emphasis in the original).
Hers is a crusading denunciation of "a climate that legitimates monism and ethnocentrism, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klanners, and abortion vigilantes." This is all rather surprising since the last I heard there were more FBI agents in neo-Nazi cults and the Klan than true fascist believers. And I haven't noticed that Jerry Falwell, Bennett's bete noire, wants to suspend any rights guaranteed by the Constitution. But after all, it's not what popular conservative avatars espouse, it's "the climate" they've engendered. That has all the hard-headedness of (to quote Huey Long) "pinning a marshmallow pie to the wall."
Uninformed Guesses
As a backdrop for her examination of crime, Bennett relies on a portrait of the economy that is devoid of nuance and texture. "The future will feature a bipolar economy of simultaneous boom and bust." Or, "Tens of thousands of blue-collar laborers will be dumped out of their highly paid skilled jobs in car plants and machine tooling factories." Bennett is entitled to guess, but one could hope the guesses would be informed.
Manufacturing jobs certainly have been lost in some
...
Read Full Article
|
|
