A Fresh Approach From a Different Angle

disch63 Thomas M. Disch A Fresh Approach From a Different Angle Mr. Hutchinson was waiting in his private office for a message from his daughter Marjorie's abductor. He preferred that term to kidnapper, which smacked of tabloid journalism. He had refrained, out of similar considerations, from informing the police. He was rich enough to pay any reasonable ransom, and the man, to judge by the tone and the careful syntax of his message, seemed the sort of person one could deal with reasonably, though the typeface of his note did simulate the typeface commonly used for computer printouts, scarcely a suitable choice in the circumstances. Mr. Hutchinson conducted all his own private correspondence in longhand. The phone rang. Not wishing to appear over-eager, Mr. Hutchinson answered on the fourth ring. It was his daughter's abductor. And, it now developed, his wife's abductor too! Furthermore, it turned out that this abductor was someone Mr. Hutchinson knew on a personal basis, that he was, in fact, Marjorie's boyfriend, Morris Clough. Morris, as Mr. Hutchinson knew from Marjorie's sporadic letters home, was something of a firebrand. He claimed to be one-quarter Cherokee and had led protests against the strip-mining of his people's ancestral, expropriated lands. Mr. Hutchinson was a large shareholder in one of the corporations conducting this operation, and though he did not feel directly accountable for the wrongs done to Morris and his people, he could sympathize with their legitimate aims. He tried to convey this sympathy to Morris and to suggest that the forcible abduction of the wife and daughter of a relatively innocent businessman was not the best way to realize the Cherokees' long-term goals. He asked Morris what ransom he considered reasonable. Morris, not at all reasonably, named a figure in excess of ten million dollars and, not content with that impudence, declared that his true object in abducting Mrs. and Miss Hutchinson was not economic gain but rather their enforced ravishment. Rape was the actual expression he used . Mr. Hutchinson asked him to reconsider. What good, he urged, could be accomplished for the Cherokees by his wife's rape? While he could see that there was a kind of poetic correspondence between strip-mining and the actions Morris proposed, he did not believe that two wrongs ever made a right. Morris admitted that, while in general he agreed with Mr. 64 the minnesota review Hutchinson, he could not, while these old wounds still so rankled, do otherwise than carry on as he had planned. At this impasse Mr. Hutchinson might well have been excused for washing his hands of the whole unseemly affair, but to his credit he did no such thing. It was one of Mr. Hutchinson's most firmly-held principles that when two parties appear to have reached an impasse what is needed is a fresh approach from a different angle. Now it happened that Mr. Hutchinson, as a leading member of the business community, was also a member of an important panel investigating the problem of drug abuse. He proposed to Morris, who was (the three-quarters that were not Cherokee) of Negro origin, that his panel might recommend the legalization of heroin. This, Mr. Hutchinson suggested, could not but be welcomed by a majority of blacks, including many who were not themselves addicts but only wished to live in communities where thousands were not driven to crime and despair by their addiction. Mr. Hutchinson pointed out that he would undoubtedly be subjected to abuse in the public press for putting forward such an unorthodox proposal . He had already been branded as "soft" and "permissive" for remarks he had made before the community School Board. But for the sake of his wife, who was dear to him, and for Majorie's sake too, he was willing to submit to these probable censures. He could not, of course, undertake to guarantee that the panel would approve his recommendation or that the legislature would act in accordance with the panel's suggestions . Morris admitted that he found Mr. Hutchinson's proposal attractive, but he confessed that for entirely personal reasons he still wished to rape...